Mapping North Korea’s Executions Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: 13 Years of the Death Penalty Under Kim Jong-un

책 소개

14 years have passed since Kim Jong-un’s rise to power in December 2011 and 12 years since the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (COI DPRK) urged accountability for North Korea’s leadership in February 2014. The COI DPRK concluded that the systematic, widespread, and gross human rights violations occurring in North Korea amount to crimes against humanity. In particular, the COI DPRK made clear that public executions and enforced disappearances are the core means supporting North Korea’s totalitarian system based on a reign of terror: “The keystone to the political system is the vast political and security apparatus that strategically uses surveillance, coercion, fear and punishment to preclude the expression of any dissent. Public executions and enforced disappearance to political prison camps serve as the ultimate means to terrorize the population into submission.” Following the 2014 COI DPRK report, TJWG began documenting and mapping North Korea’s mass atrocities in 2015. This report is TJWG’s fourth mapping report on executions in North Korea, following previous reports published in 2017, 2019, and 2021. Compared to the previous report entitled Mapping Killings Under Kim Jong-un, this report presents and visualizes more information on executions under Kim Jong-un’s rule, with a particular focus on analyzing the change that occurred after the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, TJWG’s mapping project on North Korea’s executions faced an obstacle when the outbreak of COVID-19 in China prompted North Korea to completely close its borders. Over the following five years, the number of North Koreans escaping to China declined drastically, along with the number of escapees arriving in South Korea, most of whom had escaped from North Korea to China before January 2020. Even after COVID-19 became endemic in 2023 and the need for strict border control subsided, North Korean authorities continued to keep the borders closed. Consequently, opportunities to interview North Korean escapees about the recent executions in North Korea have been diminished for a prolonged period of time. To overcome this challenge, TJWG decided to maintain its existing documentation methodology while expanding the scope of information collection, integrating data from its own documentation with other sources. As part of this effort, TJWG signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with DailyNK in April 2021 to promote freedom of information for the North Korean people and to investigate human rights violations. Since then, the organizations have been cooperating not only to improve the North Korean people’s access to external information but also to share materials and information on grave human rights violations, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This report contains three key new features. The first is the expansion and integration of data. A major aspect of this expansion involved reviewing reporting by North Korea-focused news outlets since 2010 to generate a new dataset. The information TJWG has gathered through in-person interviews with North Korean escapees is referred to as the “closed-source dataset,” while data from other organizations, such as news reports, is referred to as the “open- source dataset.” The research team standardized the data attributes to ensure compatibility between the two datasets with a view to integrated analysis. Second, this report places emphasis on observing and analyzing annual trends to deduce their causes and to suggest their implications. Third, this report adopts an internationally used crime-classification system for categorizing and analyzing the incidents documented. This allows observation of patterns around particular crimes and the implementation of the death penalty or executions by the Kim Jong-un regime for the said crimes. This report begins with the key findings, followed by an overview of the North Korean escapees who…

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