North Korea has allegedly executed citizens for watching foreign television programmes. Image credit: Pixabay
(The Post News) – UN human rights on Friday reported that, the North Korean government was implementing the death penalty, including for people caught watching and sharing foreign films and TV dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms.
The dictatorship is also subjecting its 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.
Since 2014, surveillance has grown more pervasive with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher – including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said that if this situation continued, North Koreans “will 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.
Since 2015 at least six new laws that allow for the penalty to be handed out have been launched. 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.
“He was tried along with drug criminals. These crimes are treated the same now,” she said, adding that since 2020 people had become more afraid.
The UN was asking the North Korean government to abolish its political prison camps, end the use of the death penalty and teach its citizens about human rights.
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