SEOUL – North Korea dramatically increased executions during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly for consuming foreign culture and political offences, a report published on April 28 showed.
Pyongyang closed its borders in January 2020 to stop the spread of the coronavirus, with research and media reports indicating that the diplomatically isolated nation spent subsequent years bolstering security along its frontiers.
Campaigners have said the shutdown worsened longstanding human rights abuses in North Korea, whose government is widely seen as one of the world’s most repressive.
The report by the Transitional Justice Working Group, an advocacy non-governmental organisation (NGO), found that the number of executions and death sentences more than doubled in the nearly five years after the border closure, compared with the same period before it.
The number of condemned people also more than tripled over the same period, according to the findings.
The NGO drew data from hundreds of North Korean escapees and several media outlets that maintain networks of sources inside the secretive nation, where there is no independent media and little international presence.
It analysed 144 known cases of executions and death sentencings, involving hundreds of people in total.
Since the pandemic, authorities have ramped up the use of capital punishment for offences such as consuming South Korean movies, dramas and music, it said.
Death penalty cases related to foreign culture, religion and “superstition” jumped 250 per cent after the border closure.
Another major spike in executions for political crimes, such as criticising leader Kim Jong Un, may suggest the government is “responding to growing internal dissatisfaction or intensifying state violence to suppress political discontent”, the report said.
Nearly three-quarters of the executions were carried out in public, with most people shot to death, it said.
It added that killings had taken place in dozens of cities and counties since Mr Kim rose to power in the early 2010s.
They included several sites in the capital Pyongyang, as well as public grounds such as defunct airfields, riverbanks, farmland and open-storage yards for mine waste.
The North Korean government is also accused of rights abuses including torture, forced labour and severe restrictions on freedom of expression and movement.
It is said to operate four political prison camps where up to 65,000 people are subjected to hard labour, according to a 2025 report by the Korea Institute for National Unification.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2025 that the overall human rights situation in North Korea over the past decade had shown no improvement and in many cases had worsened.
North Korea has consistently rejected allegations of abuses, accusing the United Nations of politicising human rights to undermine the regime. AFP
