As the world contemplates intervening in Syria over alleged chemical weapons attacks on civilians, spare a thought for the long-abused civilians of North Korea. No one has gassed them, so far as we are aware. But practically every other known cruelty has been meted out by the three generation Kim dynasty.

North Korea has one of the world’s worst human rights records. Free speech is non-existent, spies are everywhere, malnutrition is rampant. Until the regime turned a blind eye to black-market trading a decade or so ago, starvation was common. One aid worker, after visiting in winter, described African levels of poverty in sub-zero temperatures. As many as 1m people may have perished in the famine of the mid-to-late 1990s, according to Amnesty International.

Justice is arbitrary, to say the least. People can be frogmarched off to a concentration camp for any slight – real or imagined – against the ruling Kim family. One of the most chilling documentaries shot in North Korea shows what ought to be the uplifting story of a Nepalese eye doctor restoring the sight of about 1,000 patients, many of them blind for years. Their sight restored, they practically trample the doctor as they rush towards a portrait of Kim Jong Il, then leader, falling to their knees and thanking him for his beneficence. Whether they do so out of fear or brainwashed delusion seems almost beside the point.