Mick Hartley

Richard Lloyd Parry in the Times – Horror of North Korea’s public executions laid bare:

North Korean executioners torment condemned prisoners, mutilate them after death and force people to look at their corpses, says an investigation into capital punishment during Kim Jong-un’s decade in power.

The report by a Seoul human rights organisation says that of the public executions it has documented, the largest number are not for murder or rape, but for the crime of watching or distributing videos from South Korea.

The testimony, based on the accounts of witnesses who have defected to the south, will add to international pressure on North Korea.

Researchers for the Transitional Justice Working Group have documented 23 public executions since Kim came to power after the sudden death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in December 2011.

Two were hangings and 21 were by firing squad. The actual number carried out in this period is sure to be many times higher.

Several witnesses reported gross cruelties. “The condemned person was dragged out of a car like a dog before the public execution,” said one witness to a firing squad in Hyesan in 2012.

“The person who was about to be executed was already in a near-death condition and his eardrums seemed to be damaged, preventing him from hearing or saying anything.”

At another shooting in Sariwon in North Hwanghae province in 2014, the condemned man was tied to a wooden post with pebbles stuffed in his mouth.

Other interviewees described the mutilation of the bodies. “In Pyongyang in 2012 or 2013 the executed body was burnt with a flame-thrower in front of a crowd following execution,” the report says.

“The family of the accused was forced to attend the execution and sit in the front row to observe the scene. The father fainted after watching his son burn in front of his eyes.”

In Hyesan in 2012, a child was executed with Kalashnikov rifles. “Blood was splattered and flesh was tattered,” a witness told the justice group. “The . . . authorities folded the body of the executed in half by stepping on it, and put it in a sack. I heard that they threw the sack away.”

Students and workers were ordered to attend executions, apparently as a warning and example to other potential wrongdoers. “Even when there was fluid leaking from the condemned person’s brain, people were made to stand in line and look at the executed person in the face as a warning message,” the witness to one execution in Hamhung, North Hamgyong province, in 2012, said.

The authorities appear to have become self-conscious about such reports spreading outside North Korea. Crowds attending public executions are checked with metal detectors, according to witnesses, and phones are confiscated, to prevent the recording and disseminating of film of the events.

Seven executions described to researchers were for watching or distributing South Korean videos, five each for drug offences, prostitution and human trafficking, and the rest for murder, attempted murder or sex crimes.

It is all but impossible to verify such stories in a country as closed as North Korea, but they are consistent with the findings of other independent experts who gather the testimony of defectors.

Let's not forget the Daily NK here, regularly reporting from inside North Korea, with  – as I said the other day – virtually no mention in the mainstream press.

South Korea's Chosun Ilbo has more on this.