North Korea is executing citizens for watching foreign films as it tightens control over their private lives, according to a UN report.
The dictatorship has expanded the use of the death penalty, which includes killing people by firing squad, according to the 14-page report.
The crackdown is part of an attempt to instil a culture of fear among citizens and further divorce them from foreign culture and influence.
“No other population is under such restrictions in today’s world,” the UN Human Rights Office’s report concluded.
Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that if the 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, based on over 300 interviews with recent escapees, found that it has become nearly impossible to flee due to tightened border controls with China.
At least six new laws over the last 10 years have increased the possibility of the death penalty for an array of crimes.
One crime included in the death sentence is watching and sharing foreign content, including TV episodes and films.
UN researchers were told by escapees that since 2020, there have been more executions for such offences. These are now regularly being carried out by public firing squads.
According to the BBC, one woman named Kang Gyuri said three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content.
“He was tried along with drug criminals. These crimes are treated the same now,” Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, said.
The report added that advances in technology had allowed the government to tighten its iron fist around the population.
“Over the past 10 years, the government has exercised near total control over people, leaving them unable to make their own decisions,” it said.
Many of the experiences shared in the report contradict leader Kim Jong-un’s comments, who declared that the country’s quality of life would improve when he came into power in 2011.
Kim pledged to invest in the country’s nuclear weapons programme and strengthen the economy.
He also promised the population that they would no longer have to “tighten their belts” – meaning that they would no longer suffer from food shortages.
But the report said the majority of those interviewed did not have enough to eat when living in North Korea and that eating three meals a day was “a luxury”.
“In the early days of Kim Jong Un, we had some hope, but that hope did not last long,” one woman, who escaped in 2018, told the UN.
“The government gradually blocked people from making a living independently, and the very act of living became a daily torment,” she added.
The number of people working in forced labour has also increased over the past ten years.
Workers include those from poor families, but the report also claimed that thousands of orphans and street children have been recruited.
At least four of the country’s notorious political prison camps, first exposed in a UN commission of inquiry report in 2014, are still operating, where prisoners are routinely tortured and abused.
The UN is urging that the findings of the report be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
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