A leader with a mind ruthlessly intent on power. A population deeply devoted to its ruler. A governmental system efficiently and savagely capable of eliminating any internal dissent and opposition.

These elements of totalitarian dictatorships have remained remarkably consistent throughout time, from ancient Rome to the Soviet Union. Dictators, including Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong and Saddam Hussein, are responsible for some of the most reprehensible crimes in human history. North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and his predecessors Kim Jong-Il (his father) and Kim Il-Sung (his grandfather) seem destined to join this evil group.

Researched for an entire year, a report from the United Nations Human Rights Councils released in March 2014 details the ongoing human rights violations in North Korea, known officially as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Over the last few decades, the UN report found, the DPRK has committed “a systematic and widespread attack against all populations that are considered to pose a threat to the political system and leadership.”

The UN estimates that 120,000 North Koreans are currently held in kwan-li-so, or political prison labor camps. In February, Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international non-governmental organization, released a short documentary film, “North Korea: Accounts from Camp Survivors,” featuring interviews with former prisoners and guards at some of the kwan-li-so camps. The events these ex-detainees describe are horrifying: beatings, forced starvations, and public executions. The UN report also charges the North Korean government with “murder, enslavement, torture,…rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.”

One particularly disgusting aspect of the kwan-li-so system is the policy of “guilt by association.” According to prisoners and guards interviewed for the documentary, if a person is accused of treason by the North Korean government, that individual is not the only person detained; three generations of the accused’s family are also imprisoned. Children are arbitrarily taken captive for the “treasonous” acts of their grandparents and grow up in the miserable, harrowing environment of these secluded compounds. Even worse is the perverse ritual that occurs when new prisoner-families arrive in the kwan-li-so camps. In the HRW film, a former camp jail-guard said the initial prisoner is bound to a stake and shot at by a firing squad. “If family members or friends of the condemned cry at the execution, they are arrested on the spot and sent to the detention center to be executed,” Ahn Myung-chul, the guard, said.

The brutality in the DPRK is among the worst in the world, with the kwan-li-so camps calling to mind the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and gulags of Soviet Russia. When abuses like these happened in the past, the world excused its inaction by saying these crimes were secret and unknown — how could the global community stop the Holocaust, for instance, without knowing it was happening? This time, however, is different. “There will be no excusing a failure of action because we didn’t know,” Michael Kirby, head of the UN’s special commission, said in a February 2014 press conference. “We do know.”

Is the world content to let another Holocaust happen under its radar? Though the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the North Korean government haven’t yet reached the scale and scope of Hitler’s, continual global indifference to the plight of the North Korean victims only perpetuates these criminal, unjust actions.

Now that the world is no longer ignorant to the injustices in North Korea, the global community has the responsibility to do something, to attempt to end these violations of essential human rights. As Kenneth Roth, an executive director at HRW, points out, the international spotlight on North Korea focuses primarily on the threat of nuclear weapon development. It is time for governments around the world, including the U.S., to be as concerned with glaring human rights violations as potential nuclear proliferation. For every one missile test, thousands of innocent North Koreans are held captive, tortured, or killed. This time, as the UN’s Michael Kirby said, “there will be no excusing a failure of action.”