North Korea Executing More People For Watching Foreign Films, TV–UN

The North Korean government is increasingly implementing the death penalty, including for people caught watching and sharing foreign films and TV dramas, a major UN report has found.

According to the BBC, the government is also subjecting people to more forced labour while further restricting their freedoms, the report added.

The UN Human Rights Office found that over the past decade, the North Korean state had tightened control over “all aspects of citizens’ lives”.

“No other population is under such restrictions in today’s world,” it concluded, adding that surveillance had become “more pervasive”, helped in part by advances in technology.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said if this situation continued, North Koreans would be subjected to more of the suffering, brutal repression and fear that they have endured for so long.

The report, which is based on more than 300 interviews with people who escaped from North Korea in the past 10 years, found that the death penalty is being used more often.

At least six new laws have been introduced since 2015 that allow for the penalty to be handed out. One crime which can now be punished by death is the watching and sharing of foreign media content such as films and TV dramas, as Kim Jong Un works to successfully limit people’s access to information.

Escapees told UN researchers that from 2020 onwards there had been more executions for distributing foreign content. They described how these executions are carried out by firing squads in public to instil fear in people and discourage them from breaking the law.

Kang Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, told the BBC that three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content. She was at the trial of one 23-year-old friend who was sentenced to death.