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

The North Korean authorities is progressively implementing the decease penalty, including for radical caught watching and sharing overseas films and TV dramas, a large UN study has found.

According to the BBC, the authorities is besides subjecting radical to much forced labour portion further restricting their freedoms, the study added.

The UN Human Rights Office recovered that implicit the past decade, the North Korean authorities had tightened power implicit “all aspects of citizens’ lives”.

“No different colonisation is nether specified restrictions successful today’s world,” it concluded, adding that surveillance had go “more pervasive”, helped successful portion by advances successful technology.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said if this concern continued, North Koreans would beryllium subjected to much of the suffering, brutal repression and fearfulness that they person endured for truthful long.

The report, which is based connected much than 300 interviews with radical who escaped from North Korea successful the past 10 years, recovered that the decease punishment is being utilized much often.

At slightest six caller laws person been introduced since 2015 that let for the punishment to beryllium handed out. One transgression which tin present beryllium punished by decease is the watching and sharing of overseas media contented specified arsenic films and TV dramas, arsenic Kim Jong Un works to successfully bounds people’s entree to information.

Escapees told UN researchers that from 2020 onwards determination had been much executions for distributing overseas content. They described however these executions are carried retired by firing squads successful nationalist to instil fearfulness successful radical and discourage them from breaking the law.

Kang Gyuri, who escaped successful 2023, told the BBC that 3 of her friends were executed aft being caught with South Korean content. She was astatine the proceedings of 1 23-year-old person who was sentenced to death.