North executes people for wide range of offenses: Report

North Koreans have been executed for a wide range of infractions against their government, ranging from pointing a finger at a portrait of regime founder Kim Il Sung to watching South Korean entertainment, according to a Unification Ministry report.

Visitors to the National Assembly in Seoul on Thursday view an exhibition on the state of North Korean women’s human rights, organized by People Power Party lawmaker and North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho. [YONHAP]

North Koreans have been executed for a wide range of infractions against their government, ranging from pointing a finger at a portrait of regime founder Kim Il Sung to watching South Korean entertainment, according to a report due to be released Friday by South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

The 2023 North Korean Human Rights Report, the first to be made public in a series of annual reports commissioned by the ministry since 2017, was compiled based on testimonies from 508 North Korean defectors residing in South Korea.

Defectors’ accounts detail gross human rights violations and summary executions doled out as punishment by state security agents for crimes that are perceived as threatening the regime’s control over the populace.

Defectors interviewed for the report said they witnessed public executions of people who had been caught distributing South Korea-made media, including one man executed by firing squad in Yanggang Province in 2020 for smuggling South Korean videos from China and six adolescents between the ages of 16 and 17 sentenced to death for watching South Korean entertainment.

The regime has also been targeting people who engage in unauthorized practice of religion, with one defector telling the ministry that five leaders of an underground Christian church in Pyongyang were executed in public in 2019, while an unspecified number of their parishioners were shipped off to political prison camps and re-education camps.

Political prison camps are slave labor colonies run mostly by the North’s Ministry of State Security and used to incarcerate people accused of political offenses or determined to be politically unreliable, often for long or indefinite periods of time. Re-education camps are concentration camps operated by the Ministry of Social Security to hold people who have committed lesser infractions, although the conditions of these facilities are also said to be harsh and unsafe.

The report estimates that the regime has at least 11 political prison camps, of which it believes five are in operation.

The regime uses capital punishment to deal with crimes that do not directly challenge the regime’s worldview and propaganda-based narrative but are seen as threatening the country’s social order, defectors recounted.

They said one six-month-pregnant woman was executed in 2017 after a video spread showing her dancing in her home and pointing a finger at a portrait of regime founder Kim Il Sung, while seven women in Sariwon, North Hwanghae Province were executed by firing squad for allegedly being part of a prostitution ring.

The regime also used execution to punish those who committed violations while incarcerated.

Several defectors said that fellow prisoners who were caught trying to escape from Hamhung Re-Education Camp in 2016 and 2017 were killed by firing squad, while one man held by state security was executed after being accused of engaging in same-sex activity.

Defectors in the report also testified that North Korean women are subject to high levels of sexual and physical violence in detention, with genital examinations reportedly common during strip searches and rapes regularly occurring in prison camps.

One North Korean woman who became pregnant while in China was deported back in 2014 and had her child murdered by a prison guard as soon as she gave birth, according to a defector the report quoted.

Defectors also told the Unification Ministry that discrimination in university admissions, employment and residency based on songbun, or the perceived ideological loyalty of one’s family, is de rigueur under the regime and that people from politically suspicious backgrounds, such as descendants of South Korean prisoners-of-war and people with relatives in the South, are subject to close surveillance.

Defectors who escaped while working as laborers sent abroad to earn foreign currency for their regime recounted toiling for as long as 17 hours a day but said the regime confiscated most of their wages.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]