Speaking at the United Nations, Ji Hyeon-A said she was repatriated three times to North Korea after she was caught in China and thrown into prison.

After being released following her second escape attempt, she was caught by traffickers in China and sold to an old farmer.

She said: "He was nice to me, but he had huge debts so I had to work on his farm to pay off his debts."

But again she was caught by the Chinese authorities and returned to the hermit kingdom, where she discovered she was three months pregnant after being flung into a detention centre.

She said the North Korean regime does not tolerate mixed race babies so women who got pregnant in China were forced to have abortions.

Tearfully describing how she was forced to have an abortion without medication at a local police station, she added: “My first child passed away without ever seeing the world, without any time for me to apologise.

“Pregnant women were forced into harsh labor all day. At night, we heard pregnant mothers screaming and babies died without ever being able to see their mothers.”

Ms Ji added North Korea was “a terrifying prison and the Kim’s are carrying out a vast massacre and it takes a miracle to survive there.”

She also lashed out at the Chinese government for sending the North Koreans who had defected to the country back to Kim Jon Un’s harsh regime and urged them to stop repatriating defectors.

US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who was present at the event entitled The Terrifying Experience of forcibly Repatriated North Korean Women, said the stories of North Korean repatriates needed to be told.

She added: “The regime is using that power to develop an unnecessary arsenal and support enormous conventional military forces that pose a grave risk to international peace and security.

“Their menacing march towards nuclear weapons begins with the oppression and exploitation of ordinary North Korean people.”

There have been widespread allegations of brutalities such as murders, enslavement and torture of citizens by the North Korean regime - which the UN once described as "unparalleled in modern history".

Ms Ji also told the UN how inmates regularly starved to death without food while Kim Jong-Un gorges on expensive imported Swiss cheese and French red wine with no regard for his citizens.

In a deeply moving testimony in front of United Nations bosses, she explained how North Korean officials beat her and fed her only rotten food.

And she revealed prisoners are sometimes given raw locusts, skinned frogs and rats as food, as she painted a grim picture of what goes on inside the impoverished nation.

But the worst thing she says she witnessed in jail was the inmates’ dead bodies being given to the guard dogs for food.