North Korea executes people for sharing foreign films and TV: UN report

‘Mass surveillance’ tech has enabled world’s astir restrictive authorities to exert ‘control successful each parts of life’, UN Human Rights Office says.

North Korea has further tightened its grip connected its colonisation implicit the past decade, executing radical for activities similar sharing overseas TV dramas, according to a large United Nations report.

The UN Human Rights Office said connected Friday that tech-enabled authorities repression nether the Kim dynasty, which has governed with implicit powerfulness for 7 decades, had grown implicit a decennary of “suffering, repression, and accrued fear”.

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“No different colonisation is nether specified restrictions successful today’s world,” concluded the agency’s report, which is based connected interviews with much than 300 witnesses and victims who had fled the state and reported the further erosion of freedoms.

“To artifact the people’s eyes and ears, they strengthened the crackdowns. It was a signifier of power aimed astatine eliminating adjacent the smallest signs of dissatisfaction oregon complaint,” recounted 1 escapee, cited successful the report.

James Heenan, caput of the UN Human Rights Office for North Korea, told a Geneva briefing that the fig of executions for some mean and governmental crimes had accrued since COVID-era restrictions.

An unspecified fig of radical had already been executed nether caller laws imposing the decease punishment for distributing foreign TV series, including the fashionable K-Dramas from South Korea, helium added.

The clampdown has been aided by the enlargement of “mass surveillance” systems done technological advances, which person subjected citizens to “control successful each parts of life” implicit the past 10 years, the study said.

Heenan besides reported that children were being made to enactment successful forced labour, including alleged “shock brigades” for pugnacious sectors specified arsenic ember mining and construction.

“They’re often children from the little level of society, due to the fact that they’re the ones who can’t bribe their mode retired of it, and these daze brigades are engaged successful often precise hazardous and unsafe work,” helium said.

Last year, the UN indicated that the forced labour could, successful immoderate cases, magnitude to slavery, making it a transgression against humanity.

The sweeping reappraisal comes much than a decennary aft a landmark UN study documented executions, rapes, torture, deliberate starvation, and the detention of betwixt 80,000 and 120,000 radical successful situation camps.

The caller study covered developments since 2014, noting the government’s adoption of caller laws, policies and procedures providing a ineligible model for repression.

UN rights main Volker Turk said successful a statement: “If the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] continues connected its existent trajectory, the colonisation volition beryllium subjected to much suffering, brutal repression and fear.”

North Korea’s Geneva diplomatic ngo and its London embassy person not yet commented connected the report.

Source:

Al Jazeera and quality agencies