The US State Department released its 2022 International Religious Freedom Report on May 15, wherein it revealed how the communist government in North Korea imprisoned a two-year-old toddler for life after the authorities found a Bible in the possession of his parents. The child along with his entire family was jailed in a political prison camp in North Korea in 2009, the report read.
The report also documented several additional incidents of Christians being killed in North Korea, including the execution of a woman and her grandchild in 2011 by North Korea’s firing squad.
Some other Christians were subjected to “pigeon torture,” in which they were suspended for days with their hands tied behind their backs, unable to sit or stand.
Some were tortured with sleep deprivation, including a lady in solitary confinement who committed suicide in 2020 after jail officers refused to let her sleep.
The report read that these atrocities on Christians happen in North Korea as they are perceived as a “hostile class” and a “serious threat to loyalty to the state.”
Notably, while North Korea’s constitution provides religious freedom to its citizens, the Kim Jon-un administration continues to restrict religious activity in the country. Shamanic practitioners in North Korea face punishments ranging from six months in a forced labour camp to three or more years in reeducation camps. Christians, on the other hand, risk execution or sentences ranging from 15 years to life in a prison camp, imposed on up to three generations of the immediate family of the person found guilty.
The report provided estimated figures on such incidents, stating that approximately 70,000 Christians, as well as individuals from other faiths, are imprisoned in North Korea.
It further stated that Christians imprisoned in these camps have described harsh conditions and different sorts of physical abuse. According to the report, 90% of reported human rights violations against both Shamanic believers and Christians were committed by the Ministry of State Security.
The State Department, citing a report by Korea Future, a non-profit organisation in North Korea said that the North Korean government persecutes individuals who engage in religious practises, possess religious items, have contact with religious people, or share religious beliefs. Individuals who are persecuted may be imprisoned, detained, forced to work, tortured, denied a fair trial, deported, denied the right to life or subjected to sexual abuse.
The report by Korea Future, which interviewed 151 Christian women who were abused, discovered that the most common forms of abuse in North Korea were arbitrary arrest, torture, deportation, forced labour, and sexual violence.
Several refugees who had fled North Korea recounted textbooks that featured sections on Christian missionaries. The missionaries were accused of a variety of “evil deeds,” including “rape, blood-sucking, organ harvesting, murder, and espionage,” according to the textbooks.
Such atrocities on people living in North Korea are very common. The communist country strictly controls the lives of its citizens.
North Korea publicly executes two teenagers for watching and distributing South Korean films
Last year, the North Korean government publicly executed two teenagers for watching and circulating South Korean drama shows among their friends, media outlet Radio Free Asia quoted two eyewitnesses as confirming. The execution of the minors aged 16 or 17 was carried out in October 2022.
According to the report, the teenagers were taken before the public, sentenced to death, and then shot down by a firing squad at an airfield in the city while residents in the area were forced to watch the execution.
In 2021, a North Korean man had been sentenced to death for smuggling the South Korean Netflix series ‘Squid Game’ on USB through China and sold their copies after seven high school students were caught watching the show.
A student who bought the USB from the smuggler is given a life sentence while six others who saw it with him have been sentenced to five years of hard labour. Teachers and school administrators are also fired and banished to work in remote areas in mines, the report said citing sources.
