“There were beatings. There were people who were out for interrogations and had bruises when they returned. They were crying.” This woman’s account of a pre-trial detention centre in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was one of over a hundred in a new report highlighting extensive human rights violations in the country’s detentions centres.

In his last report to the Human Rights Council, Dainius Puras, Special Rapporteur on the right to health, calls for a human rights-based approach to treating mental distress and an end to the dominance of psychotropic medicines and coercive institutionalisation.