North Korea’s bankrupt justice system has delivered a cruel verdict - 12 years of hard labor - to the American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. After a detention of nearly three months in perhaps the world’s most repressive country, they have already paid a huge and unfair price for doing their job. They should be released immediately.

Ms. Ling, 32, and Ms. Lee, 36, were detained on March 17 by North Korean soldiers patrolling the border between China and North Korea. They were employed by Current TV, a San Francisco-based media company that was co-founded by Al Gore, the former vice president. News accounts said they were reporting on North Korean refugees who had fled the country - a highly sensitive issue - although Ms. Ling’s sister told ABC News that the women were working on a report about the trafficking of women from North Korea to China.

Whatever the case, they do not deserve to be sent to a brutal labor camp where, according to international human rights activists and North Korean defectors, detainees endure beatings, hunger and inhumane workloads. With no access to lawyers or due process, the two journalists did not have anything approaching a fair chance to defend themselves.

We don’t know how much their ordeal is being driven by North Korea’s succession saga or escalating tensions with the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. We know that there is no excuse for their detention or this outrageous sentence.

North Korea has shown leniency to Americans in the past. In 1996, on a drunken dare, Evan Hunziker swam across the Yalu River from China and was accused of spying and was detained for three months. He was freed after Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who at the time was a congressman, traveled to Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, to plead for his release. In 1994, Mr. Richardson also negotiated the release of an American pilot shot down over North Korea.

We hope the Obama administration is vigorously working the few diplomatic levers available. It should urge China, North Korea’s main food and fuel supplier, to speak up for the two journalists and send an American envoy to make the case directly in Pyongyang. Failing to free them would only worsen relations with President Obama, who came into office committed to reviving negotiations, and add to growing calls in Washington - and around the world - for tougher sanctions.