North Korea is tightening its grip on everyday life, with the death penalty increasingly used against citizens caught watching or sharing foreign films and TV dramas, a new UN report has found.
The study, released by the UN Human Rights Office, paints a bleak picture of life under Kim Jong Un. It says punishments have grown harsher, surveillance more pervasive and freedoms steadily eroded. “No other population is under such restrictions in today’s world,” the report concluded.
Based on more than 300 interviews with escapees over the past decade, the findings describe a country where forced labour and public executions remain tools of control. Six new laws passed since 2015 expanded the death penalty, including for consuming foreign media.
Several defectors told UN researchers that since 2020 they had witnessed more executions for distributing South Korean dramas or other foreign content. These were often carried out by firing squads before crowds, meant to terrify others into compliance.
Kang Gyuri, who fled in 2023, recalled the trial of a 23-year-old friend who was sentenced to death for possessing South Korean shows. “He was tried along with drug criminals,” she told the BBC. “These crimes are treated the same now.” Three of her friends, she said, were executed.
Volker Türk, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that without change, North Koreans “will be subjected to more of the suffering, brutal repression and fear that they have endured for so long.”
When Kim Jong Un took power in 2011, many hoped for better. He promised that families would no longer have to “tighten their belts,” and pledged to boost the economy while strengthening national defence. But since talks with the United States and other Western nations collapsed in 2019, the report says, living conditions have sharply deteriorated.
Almost all those interviewed said food was scarce. For many, three meals a day had become a luxury. The pandemic only worsened shortages, and escapees reported deaths from hunger across the country.
At the same time, authorities cracked down on informal markets — once vital for survival — and sealed borders with China, ordering troops to shoot those attempting escape.
“In the early days of Kim Jong Un, we had some hope, but that hope did not last long,” said one woman who escaped in 2018 at 17. She described daily life as “a torment.”
The report concluded that the North Korean state now exercises near-total control, blocking what one defector described as “people’s eyes and ears.” Surveillance technology, it added, has only tightened the regime’s grip.
For those who fled, the message is clear: hope has given way to fear, and the price of defiance can be death.
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