Kim Jong-Un executing North Koreans for watching foreign films

Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea has stepped up grisly executions - many of them punishment for people caught watching and sharing foreign films and TV dramas, a UN report has found. The rogue state is also pressing some of the population into forced labour camps and imposing sweeping clamp-downs on freedom of its people.

Investigators within the UN Human Rights Office says over the past decade the North Korean state had tightened control over "all aspects of citizens' lives.” A report declared: “No other population is under such restrictions in today's world,” and that routine surveillance is now "more pervasive". The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said that if this situation continued, North Koreans "will be subjected to more of the suffering, brutal repression and fear that they have endured for so long.”

The report, based on more than 300 interviews with North Korean defectors, found that the death penalty is being used more often. At least six new laws have been introduced since 2015 allowing punishment by death to be handed out.

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One crime is the watching and sharing of foreign media content such as films and TV dramas, as Kim Jong Un restricts his people’s ability to see the outside world. Escapees told researchers that from 2020 onwards there had been more executions for distributing foreign content.

Executions are done by firing squads in public to put fear into people and discourage them from breaking the law. Kang Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, told the BBC that three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content.

She was at the trial of one 23-year-old friend who was sentenced to death. She said: "He was tried along with drug criminals. These crimes are treated the same now.”

The report said Pyongyang has boosted forced labour in the past ten years. In the past the Daily Mirror has revealed testimony from a number of defectors and exposed secretly filmed footage of labour camps.

One escapee told how she witnessed public executions in Pyongyang when people were tied to large guns and then blown to bits. She also described how young women she knew had been selected by Kim Jong-Un to act his servants as sex-slaves.

Tanks were then used to press their remains into the ground, supposedly erasing any memory of them. She also described how young women she knew had been selected by Kim Jong-Un to act his servants as sex-slaves. Another woman told how she escaped North Korea by crossing a river frontier into China - but tragically her daughter had been taken into the Chinese underworld and trafficked.

Some of the most severe human rights violations were discovered to be taking place at the country's notorious political prison camps, where people can be locked up for life and "disappeared". This 2025 report finds that at least four of these camps are still operating, while detainees in regular prisons are still being tortured and abused.

Escapees said they had witnessed prisoners die from ill treatment, overwork and malnutrition, though the UN did hear of "some limited improvements" at the facilities, including "a slight decrease in violence by guards.”

Kim took power in Pyongyang in 2011 after his despotic father died and many North Koreans had hoped their lives would improve. But many aspects of their struggle to survive became far worse.

Under the 41 year-old dictator North Korea has strived to gain nuclear weapons, despite the suffering of the entire population who have suffered terrible famines, millions dying of illness and starvation. Thousands of his soldiers have been sent to their deaths fighting in Ukraine alongside Russian forces, hired out as mercenaries by greedy Kim.

North Korea is still technically at war with the South, although all-out fighting between the two between 1950 and 1953 ended with the most heavily militarised border in the world being established. Anyone caught trying to escape North Korea gets shot or put into hard labour camps.

Witnesses have also in the past told the Daily Mirror how North Korean troops force children and parents to witness street executions to brainwash them into complying with the oppressive regime.