The people of North Korea endure the harshest repression in the world, with the death penalty reportedly used for sharing foreign media, including popular South Korean television dramas, according to a new report from the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR).
The 14-page document detailed how ordinary North Korean people’s lives have become significantly more difficult in the last decade.
The reportwas based on interviews with around 300 people who have managed to leave North Korea, with the government in Pyongyang refusing to grant access to UN investigators. The North Korean government has rejected the report’s findings.
The report found, among other things, that the government, “continued to exercise total control over the population and severely restrict the enjoyment of fundamental rights and freedoms, leaving people unable to fully make their own political, social or economic decisions.”
Draconian laws on outside information
It also identified three laws “that criminalize access to unauthorized foreign information and prohibit the consumption or dissemination of information (through, for example, publications, music and movies) from ‘hostile’ nations and the use of linguistic expressions that do not conform with prescribed socialist ideology and culture.”
“These laws raise serious concerns of unlawful restrictions on the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” it added. “They also provide for severe punishments, including the death penalty, for protected speech.”
The use of the death penalty for watching foreign movies or listening to music from South Korea is more severe than murder and “contrary to the right to life,” the report said.
James Heenan, head of the UN human rights office for North Korea, said that an unspecified number of people had already been executed under the new laws for distributing foreign TV series, including the popular K-Dramas from its southern neighbor.
‘Self-criticism sessions’ required
Elections are mostly symbolic, the report said, adding that citizens are required to take part in frequent “self-criticism sessions” and undergo constant indoctrination. It also noted that freedom of movement is increasingly restricted and defectors report torture and mistreatment in detention facilities.
“Many reported that they had witnessed deaths in detention, primarily as a result of torture and ill-treatment, overwork, malnutrition and suicide,” it found, with a severe lack of food and medical care in detention facilities.
Kim Eujin fled the North with her mother in the 1990s and now works with defector organizations in Seoul. From talking with recent arrivals — their numbers fewer in recent years due to the North Korean government’s increased vigilance against would-be escapees — she agrees that the already dire situation in the North is getting worse.
“The government controls every part of people’s lives and that is how they control them,” she told DW.
“The government has changed the law recently so that it is illegal for ordinary people to sell their rice or corn or other staple foodstuffs in the market,” she said. “Now, the only way to get those basic necessities is to go to government shops, where prices are higher.”
‘Total control’ of North Koreans
“Both the people and the government know that if the regime controls the food, then they can make life even more difficult for anyone who does not follow their rules,” she said.
The most draconian changes have come around foreign influences on people’s lives, Kim said.
“People can be executed for watching content from abroad or sharing it with other people,” she said. “There are so many laws that can be used to punish people; it is total control.”
As well as a blanket ban on foreign movies, television shows and music, the clampdown has extended to haircuts that are not on the list of state-approved styles, clothing that looks foreign or is worn in a style that can be considered foreign, or using words or terms that are used in the South.
“The laws are much stronger now, but I think that just means that the previous laws did not work and introducing new laws shows that Kim Jong Un is frightened what will happen if more of his people see how people outside North Korea live,” Kim Eujin said.
Other groups that have been campaigning for human rights in the North concur with the UN report, although Song Young-Chae, a South Korean academic and activist with the Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, says words alone cannot communicate the hardships that citizens of the world’s most reclusive state experience.
“The human rights situation in the North has definitely become worse and I do not like to think about the way that people there are living,” he said. “On the other hand, we could see these crackdowns on what people watch or listen to and the way that access to food is limited as signaling weakness in the regime.
“If the leadership felt they had full control of the people and society, then they would not need to be increasing the pressure on ordinary people.”
A solution to the North’s human rights challenges is difficult, he admitted, with some suggesting that the outside world offering greater assistance might raise the people’s living standards and “make the regime feel safer as people are more content.”
Closer ties with Russia, China
He agrees, however, that Pyongyang’s deepening trade and security ties with Russia and China suggest that it no longer needs assistance from elsewhere and that it will continue along the path of authoritarian rule.
Kim Eujin is also torn between cooperating with Pyongyang to help the people of her homeland and maintaining pressure on the regime.
“I am very disappointed by the policies of the new government in South Korea, which has stopped all radio broadcasts into the North,” she said. “Those broadcasts were one of the only ways that people there could get information on what was happening in the outside world.
“I worry that this government is going to try to solve its problems with the North by just being nice,” she said. “But that’s being nice to the regime, not the people.”
The UN report also found some limited improvements, such as reduced use of violence by guards in detention facilities, and new laws that appear to strengthen fair trial guarantees.
Edited by: Keith Walker
