Does North Korea Really Execute People for Watching South Korean Videos?

A decade ago Yeonmi Park, who fled North Korea in 2007 at age 13, claimed she had witnessed North Korea publicly execute someone for the “crime” of watching a foreign movie in the border city of Hyesan around 2002. This was later questioned by the journalist Mary Ann Jolley, who found multiple North Korean defectors who, in contrast, testified that public executions in the city had stopped years earlier. One defector laughed at the idea that North Koreans could get executed for merely watching videos. But major South Korean organizations adopted the claim, and it has faced little scrutiny since.

In 2015, when citing testimony on an execution for watching South Korean adult videos, the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), a South Korean government think tank, “forgot” to include the drug charges against the condemned. KINU quietly corrected itself a year later but never reconsidered its claim that there were executions of North Koreans for merely watching videos. The same year DailyNK alleged that several smugglers were executed for watching South Korean videos, although an equally convincing alternative explanation was that they were sentenced to death for smuggling those videos into the country. Fact-checking was also neglected after North Korea adopted the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture in December 2020. DailyNK, the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), and the South Korean government all fraudulently claimed the law allowed executions of consumers of forbidden media.

Three times North Korean materials were leaked that proved this allegation wrong, but journalists from the BBC to NK News preferred to believe the narrative pushed by activists instead of scrutinizing the claim. DailyNK itself had acquired documents explaining the law in early January 2021, making clear that this law did not threaten video watchers with death. Only in cases of import and distribution of South Korean videos and publications, or if someone organized and promoted the group consumption of such content as a member of a criminal organization, could the death penalty be applied.

In March 2023, DailyNK released the full text of the August 2022 revision of the law, which again confirmed the punishments described in the explanatory documents, although the last the sentence of Article 27 on South Korean media, which covered the scope of the death penalty, was missing. A North Korean propaganda video publicly released in January 2024 also showed the full Article 27, again confirming media consumption alone was only punishable with prison time.

Manufacturing Legal Evidence

Despite the explicit stipulations in the law, the South Korean government and activists insisted the law’s Article 7 provided a loophole by which the death penalty could be applied to violators. DailyNK released an English translation in March 2023 and insisted the Korean term “kukhyong” in this article could only be understood as “death penalty.” It allegedly stipulated “strict legal sanctions up to and including death penalty against any citizen bringing in, viewing, and distributing reactionary ideology and culture.” The translation included in South Korea’s 2024 government report on North Korean human rights released in September also insisted it was directly referencing the death penalty.

During a press conference on the 2024 report, Kim Seon-jin, the head of the Unification Ministry's North Korea Human Rights Record Center, told journalists that Article 7 explicitly allowed the death penalty for consuming “South Korean movies, dramas and music.” The same allegation was also made by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk before the U.N. Security Council two weeks earlier. He claimed the law’s Article 7 authorized “severe sanctions, including capital punishment, for the offense of introducing, viewing or disseminating so-called reactionary culture. Put simply, people in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea risk death for merely watching or sharing a foreign television series.”

North Korean dictionaries, freely accessible in South Korea, have made it clear since the 1960s that the crucial term in this article has taken on a broader meaning than in the South, where it is merely a synonym for the death penalty. The term was defined as extremely severe punishment with the death penalty only named as the most prominent one, while the example sentence references a 15-year prison sentence for a revolutionary. For two decades the South Korean state has sponsored work on a joint Korean dictionary. It speaks to a certain incompetency in the Unification Ministry that it was unaware of the correct translation of this term.

Tampering With Testimony

DailyNK and the South Korean government also did not shy away from blatantly manipulating testimony by North Korean defectors to support their claim that Article 7 of the law allowed executions of video watchers. Along with its report, the Unification Ministry also released a promotional video in June. It claimed to use the testimony cited in the report, but the video significantly altered the single testimony on a public execution under the 2020 law for South Korean media that the ministry was able to acquire so far.

According to one North Korean defector, whom the BBC already interviewed in late 2023, there was an execution in April 2022 with the announced charges being consumption and sharing of South Korean songs and movies. The video only cited the charges of watching those videos, however. It also claimed the testimony stated that North Koreans in the past received only one year of “reform through labor” for this crime. But in the report the punishment was “short-term labor,” which North Korea's criminal code defines as a short-term punishment during which no rights are revoked. This makes it in no way comparable or, for experts, confusable with the harsher punishment of reform through labor.

That video also was screened at the ministry’s International Dialogue on North Korean Human Rights held at the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies in July. There Kim Seon-jin himself repeated the false claim of the video and stated the execution happened for merely watching South Korean videos.

The first public South Korean government report on North Korea’s human rights situation, released in March 2023, wanted readers to believe it provided evidence that North Koreans had been executed for merely watching South Korean videos. Several times the text spoke of executions for “watching and sharing” those videos – just like KINU and TJWG did to claim they had evidence for death sentences for video watchers.

Apparently, even South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol fell victim to this linguistic charade by his own administration. He first repeated the official phrase of “watching and sharing” in his English speech before the U.S. Congress in April 2023, but the next day during his speech at Harvard University he claimed the report included testimony on executions of movie watchers. To make matters worse, those who listened to his Congress speech  – ranging from journalists to even the live interpreter hired by the South Korean government – already had understood the claim in this way.

After the full text of the law was released in March 2023, the editor-in-chief of DailyNK, Lee Sangyong, also began to alter testimony, mostly reported on by DailyNK, to fit his claim of executions for video watchers. In a text published by 38 North and at two public events he cited several reports on executions that he claimed were conducted under the 2020 law, including four cases with charges allegedly being merely consumption or possession of forbidden media. One of the four was described as the execution of a military official for “distributing a file containing world news” in English or containing “world news and street scenes” in Korean.

But the title of the original DailyNK report stated that the officer in question had distributed “impure edited content” (pulsun pyonjibmul), which Article 27 lists next to publications, movies, and documentary footage as media types banned from being brought into the country or distributed under threat of death. It is unclear if “impure” here means adult or South Korean content, but Article 29 of the law would have allowed similar punishments for pornography.

Another case citing execution for listening to Radio Free Asia for a decade happened weeks before the law was actually adopted. The law does not even include explicit punishments for listening to U.S. or South Korean broadcasts targeting North Koreans. This also disqualified another execution in June 2023 for tuning into TV broadcasts created by the South Korean government with the sole aim to be aired into North Korea.

The last of the four cases of executions for media consumption Lee described as the execution of a high-ranking military official for watching South Korean videos, leaving out the fact that his possessions were seized as well. This would only be possible under the law if he received gains through his illegal acts, like selling the videos as well. More likely he was sentenced under the broad definition of “anti-state crime” under the criminal code, which comes with the combined punishments of death and seizure of property.

Reached for comment, Lee told The Diplomat, “When North Korea first enacted its ‘Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Law’ in late 2020, the section on South Korean content (Article 27) specified the death penalty. However, when the law was revised in August 2022, this was changed to ‘life sentence with forced labor.’”

He continued:

That said, in North Korea, the “words” or “directives” of the Supreme Leader often take precedence over written law. There are reports from inside the country that suggest executions are still carried out, particularly in cases involving corruption among high-ranking officials or large-scale distribution of banned content. So while enforcement typically begins with detection and crackdown procedures specified in the law, execution remains a possibility through these alternate channels. This kind of arbitrary interpretation is common in North Korea, and may also be part of a strategy to maintain an atmosphere of fear.

TJWG also claimed it received testimony on executions for video watching in three different reports since 2017 and distorted testimony to fit this narrative. The New York Times wrote the NGO’s 2021 report collected evidence on seven executions for watching or sharing K-Pop, while NK News claimed watching South Korean videos was the “top reason” for executions. But all this was apparently incorrect, without the NGO bothering to intervene.

When I pressed the NGO to disclose its evidence in August 2023, founder and chief executive Hubert Younghwan Lee admitted that the NGO had identified only a single execution for watching South Korean videos, while “some” of the other six executions were for distributing and “some” came with the combined charge of watching and sharing. He also disclosed that the crucial execution for their claim was a case of a group watching adult videos – information that the NGO had intentionally left out of its reports. Its 2019 report had cited the charge that led to this very execution of five men as “watching South Korean videos with women” and vaguely claimed that interviewees spoke of executions for watching “South Korean media of various kinds.” This case would have been construed in North Korea either as facilitating and organizing prostitution or, as also defined as capital offense in the 2020 law, as organizing group consumption of pornography.

Conclusion

It is surprising the length to which activists and the South Korean government have gone to back up a false claim that watchers of South Korean videos are threatened with death in North Korea. The evidence is already sufficient to argue that video watchers receive long prison sentences and distributors are executed. This is already shocking, and could have been turned into a convincing campaign of criticism against the North.

But instead, critics insisted on pushing a sensationalist narrative in the hope of further mobilizing public sentiment against North Korea. For activists, this could mean increased funding; for the government, a chance to rally the public behind their hardline North Korea policy. The tendency of South Korean conservatives to bend or break the truth when it comes to North Korea is well known and it is surprising that even major media outlets preferred to ignore the numerous red flags in these claims.

During his inauguration speech in 2022, the South Korean president lamented that “truth is oftentimes bent out of shape and grossly distorted due to conflicts between nations.” He appears utterly unaware that his administration’s human rights campaign against the North has become a major example of this.