North Korea’s use of executions is nothing new. Public executions have long been one of the regime’s signature tools for instilling fear in the population. What deserves attention is not the existence of executions, but the fact that the reasons for them are changing.
A recent report by the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), a Seoul-based human rights organization that documents and maps human rights violations in North Korea, shows how patterns of execution under Kim Jong Un’s rule have shifted around the COVID-19 border closure. The report analyzed 144 cases of execution or death sentences during the Kim Jong Un era and found that at least 358 people were executed across 136 confirmed cases. As the report emphasizes, these figures represent a confirmed minimum; the true scale is likely larger.
The critical finding is this: since COVID-19, the grounds for execution have been shifting away from ordinary violent crime and toward outside information, South Korean culture, religion, and political dissent. In other words, what the Kim Jong Un regime now fears is not simple criminality. It is the process by which North Korean people come to know the outside world, make comparisons, and begin to imagine a different life.
