A good many human rights violations including the one at Auschwitz-Birkenau have been reported throughout history, but North Korea? case can be called a general catalog of everything, Dr. Yoon Yeo-sang said in an interview with a domestic news agency early this week.

Dr. Yoon, 42, with a Ph.D. in Politics, is the head of the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB), which has collected and collated testimonies and documentation on North Korea? human rights conditions since 2003.

Yoon and 10 other researchers at NKDB analyze the country? human rights violations through interviews with North Korean refugees. They also provide the sufferers with psychological therapy for them to recover from the memories of torture and detention back in North Korea.

"Numerous types of human rights abuses are carried out in North Korea, but they are not widely known outside the state," Yoon said.

The center investigated and interviewed human rights violations from more than three thousand defectors inside and outside South Korea and gathered more than 170 volumes of memoirs written by visitors to North Korea and defectors. Newspaper articles, research papers and videotapes have also been included in the archives.

The center? database is classified into 16 types of violations, including violations of the right to life, freedom, health, education, residence change, marriage, expression of thought and assembly.

As of February 2008, a total of 4,235 human rights violations and 3,217 victims have been archived, Yoon said. Among the victims, several hundred investigations have been completed, but that number will soon exceed ten thousand, Yoon added.