North Korea executing more people for watching foreign films and TV, UN finds

The North Korean authorities is more and more implementing the demise penalty, together with for folks caught watching and sharing overseas movies and TV dramas, a serious UN report has discovered.

The dictatorship, which stays largely lower off from the world, can be subjecting its folks to extra pressured labour whereas additional limiting their freedoms, the report added.

The UN Human Rights Workplace discovered that over the previous decade the North Korean state had tightened management over “all points of residents’ lives”.

“No different inhabitants is underneath such restrictions in at this time’s world,” it concluded, including that surveillance had turn into “extra pervasive”, helped partially by advances in know-how.

The UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, stated that if this example continued, North Koreans “shall be subjected to extra of the struggling, brutal repression and concern that they’ve endured for therefore lengthy”.

The report, which relies on greater than 300 interviews with individuals who escaped from North Korea up to now 10 years, discovered that the demise penalty is getting used extra typically.

At the very least six new legal guidelines have been launched since 2015 that permit for the penalty to be handed out. One crime which might now be punished by demise is the watching and sharing of overseas media content material comparable to movies and TV dramas, as Kim Jong Un works to efficiently restrict folks’s entry to data.

Escapees advised UN researchers that from 2020 onwards there had been extra executions for distributing overseas content material. They described how these executions are carried out by firing squads in public to instil concern in folks and discourage them from breaking the regulation.

Kang Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, advised the BBC that three of her buddies had been executed after being caught with South Korean content material. She was on the trial of 1 23-year-old good friend who was sentenced to demise.

“He was tried together with drug criminals. These crimes are handled the identical now,” she stated, including that since 2020 folks had turn into extra afraid.

Such experiences run counter to what North Korean folks had anticipated from the previous decade.

When the present chief Kim Jong Un got here to energy in 2011, the escapees who had been interviewed stated that they had hoped their lives would enhance, as Kim had promised they might now not must “tighten their belts” – that means they might have sufficient to eat. He promised to develop the financial system, whereas additionally defending the nation by additional creating its nuclear weapons.

However the report discovered that since Kim shunned diplomacy with the West and the US in 2019, as a substitute specializing in his weapons programme, folks’s dwelling conditions and human rights had “degraded”.

Virtually everybody interviewed stated they didn’t have sufficient to eat, and having three meals a day was a “luxurious”. In the course of the Covid pandemic, many escapees stated there had been a extreme lack of meals, and folks throughout the nation died of starvation.

On the identical time, the federal government cracked down on the casual marketplaces the place households would commerce, making it more durable for them to make a dwelling. It additionally made it almost not possible to flee from the nation, by tightening controls alongside the border with China and ordering troops to shoot these making an attempt to cross.

“Within the early days of Kim Jong Un, we had some hope, however that hope didn’t final lengthy,” stated one younger lady who escaped in 2018 on the age of 17.

“The federal government regularly blocked folks from making a dwelling independently, and the very act of dwelling grew to become a day by day torment,” she testified to researchers.

The UN report stated that “Over the previous 10 years the federal government has exercised close to complete management over folks, leaving them unable to make their very own selections” – be they financial, social or political. The report added that enhancements in surveillance know-how had helped make this doable.

One escapee advised researchers these authorities crackdowns had been supposed “to dam folks’s eyes and ears”.

“It’s a type of management aimed toward eliminating even the smallest indicators of dissatisfaction or criticism,” they stated, talking anonymously.

The report additionally discovered the federal government is utilizing extra pressured labour than it was a decade in the past. Folks from poor households are recruited into “shock brigades” to finish bodily demanding duties, comparable to building or mining initiatives.

The employees hope this can enhance their social standing, however the work is hazardous, and deaths are widespread. Relatively than enhance employees’ security, nevertheless, the federal government glorifies deaths, labelling them as a sacrifice to Kim Jong Un. In recent times it has even recruited hundreds of orphans and road youngsters, the report claims.

This newest analysis follows a groundbreaking UN fee of inquiry report in 2014, which discovered, for the primary time, that the North Korean authorities was committing crimes towards humanity. Among the most extreme human rights violations had been found to be going down on the nation’s infamous political jail camps, the place folks could be locked up for all times and “disappeared”.

This 2025 report finds that at the very least 4 of those camps are nonetheless working, whereas detainees in common prisons are nonetheless being tortured and abused.

Many escapees stated that they had witnessed prisoners die from unwell therapy, overwork and malnutrition, although the UN did hear of “some restricted enhancements” on the services, together with “a slight lower in violence by guards”.

The UN is asking for the scenario to be handed to the Worldwide Legal Court docket within the Hague.

Nevertheless, for this to occur, it could should be referred by the UN Safety Council. Since 2019, two of its everlasting members, China and Russia, have repeatedly blocked makes an attempt to impose new sanctions on North Korea.

Final week, Kim Jong Un joined the Chinese language chief Xi Jinping and the Russian President Vladimir Putin at a army parade in Beijing, signalling these international locations’ tacit acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme and therapy of its residents.

In addition to urging the worldwide neighborhood to behave, the UN is asking the North Korean authorities to abolish its political jail camps, finish using the demise penalty and educate its residents about human rights.

“Our reporting reveals a transparent and robust need for change, notably amongst (North Korea’s) younger folks,” stated the UN human rights chief, Mr Türk.