WASHINGTON (Yonhap) ― Two young North Korean defectors spoke of tragic ordeals they went through before and after fleeing the communist nation Wednesday as the State Department hosted a special Human Rights Day event to promote awareness of how much Pyongyang mistreats its own people.

The event marked the first time that the department has invited North Korean defectors to speak on International Human Rights Day.

U.S. officials attending the event included Amb. Robert King, special envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, and Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Tom Malinowski.

It was part of U.S. efforts to continue to ratchet up pressure on Pyongyang to improve its human rights record after a U.N. General Assembly committee passed a landmark resolution last month that calls for referring the issue to the International Criminal Court.

“North Korea has one of the worst human rights records of any nation on the Earth,” King said, adding that the communist nation stood at rock bottom in a recent assessment by the Economist of the human rights records of 167 nations in the world.

The young defectors, Joseph Kim and Yeonmi Park, shared powerful stories with the audience.

Park, 21, first talked about how she grew up in a North Korean city near the China border, where she witnessed the public execution of the mother of one of her friends for selling foreign DVDs. After her father was punished for doing unauthorized trade with China, Park said she and her mother fled to China.

Silence descended in the State Department’s Dean Acheson Auditorium as Park spoke of one of her first experiences in China:

A broker demanding sex with Park, then only 13, with a threat to send them back to the North, and her mother offering to be raped instead to protect her daughter.

Park ultimately came to South Korea via Mongolia. She is now a college student.

“They are being treated like animals. No one deserves to be treated this way,” Park said of North Korean refugees hiding in China.

Kim, 24, talked about how his poor family struggled with hunger in his hometown, also near China, saying he often left home at 5 a.m. in search of firewood and came back at midnight and how he spent his birthday without having any food.

“Hunger is humiliation and hunger is hopeless,” he said. “This famine was created by government policies. I know South Korea did not have a famine like this even though they have similar climate and geographies. It’s really to think about how many people have suffered and starved to death.”

Kim said he lost his father to starvation. His death left the family in an even more difficult situation and his mother and elder sister left for China in search of food. A few months later, his mother was arrested in China and repatriated but only after his sister was sold to a man in China, he said.

Failure to say goodbye properly to his sister when she left for China remains “one of my biggest regrets in my life,” he said.

Kim later fled to China and came ultimately to the United States. He’s now a college student in New York.

“I’m eternally grateful to the U.S. government” for allowing defectors like him not only to resettle, but also to have an experience of a “true meaning of freedom.”

“To me, freedom means being able to imagine who I want to be and actually having a chance to make it possible,” he said.

Assistant Secretary Malinowski said that the United States will keep up pressure on the North to improve its human rights record and the issue will “stay on the agenda of the U.N. Security Council permanently until no longer it needs to be there.”

Malinowski said the State Department will disclose all information it has about the North’s human rights violations, such as political prison camps, on a government website at www.HumanRights.gov.

“One day, the North Korean people will be free. That is inevitable,” he said. “The Korean Peninsula will be whole and our goal is to try to do whatever we can to accelerate that progress.”