Teenagers sentenced to forced labour in North Korea

On 18th January, the South Korean Institute for South and North Development Research (SAND) released a video from North Korea showing the public sentencing of two teenagers in front of their schoolmates. According to the video, the two 16-year-olds were convicted of watching and distributing South Korean films and music videos, which are banned by the North Korean government, and for this the two teenagers were sentenced to 12 years of hard labour.

At the end of the sentence the video shows a text explaining North Korea's laws on importing or distributing South Korean media and a final segment criticising North Korean women for adopting 'foreign customs' including dyeing their hair, wearing shorts or tight-fitting clothes.

The ban on films, TV series, and anything related to South Korean culture in North Korea was imposed by the Pyongyang government as part of its strategy to control information and promote the regime's ideology centred around the Kim cult. It is very rare to obtain such footage from North Korea as video, photos and any evidence of life in the country are banned.

The footage appears to have been filmed in 2022, and then to have been shown within the country by various organisations to educate Kim's ideological upbringing and warn of the apparent threats involved in the distribution and viewing of these products. In an interview with the president of SAND reported by Reuters, the North Korean defector argues that Kim is tightening penalties and controls even more, to contain the risk that with the spread of mobile phones, especially among young people, the population may be exposed to ideas and values different from those promoted by the North Korean government, imposing even more control over the rights and freedoms of the population. In the video, the narrator repeats in a propagandistic manner how the culture of the enemy, South Korea, is spreading among teenagers, claiming that the two convicts have ruined their future.

In the past, young people who broke the law in this way were sent to youth labour camps with a sentence of usually less than five years.

In 2020, however, Pyongyang enacted a law to make it punishable by death to watch or distribute South Korean entertainment as an act against socialism.

Since the 'anti-reactionary thought law' came into force, the restrictions on civil liberty have worsened with numerous such sentences and public executions of those suspected of carrying out activities of ideological divergence and against the regime, in which activities that have to do with Western culture are also included. In this way, Kim Jong Un continues to repress the population and in particular the youth in order to 'stop the spread of foreign, anti-socialist and consumerist language' considered dangerous to North Korean society. The law states that depending on the severity, the state may even apply the death penalty against anyone who introduces, displays, and distributes reactionary ideology and culture. The penalty for anyone caught in possession of large quantities of audio-visual products from South Korea, the USA and Japan could be the death penalty, while the penalty for viewing is imprisonment in forced labour camps for up to 15 years.

Last August, more than 50 countries at a UN Council in New York strongly condemned the human rights violations in the DPRK, denouncing the arbitrary killings, forced detentions, and punishments inflicted for alleged crimes committed, but according to the North Korean leader, it is an instrumentalization of human rights to further Western goals of domination. This narrative is the same one that is spread by the government, precisely through footage of this kind, to indoctrinate the population with the concept of the 'enemy'; however, getting an accurate picture of what is happening inside the isolated country ruled by Kim Jong Un is extremely difficult. The authorities control all information flows and present state propaganda to the world.

Translated by Flora Stanziola 

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