Watching K-Pop Can Get You Killed in North Korea — and It’s About to Get Worse
The execution was carried out at a mine.
A 22-year-old man was shot by firing squad in South Hwanghae Province in 2022 — not for violence, not for theft, but for listening to 70 South Korean songs, watching three South Korean films, and distributing them to others. His offense, documented in testimony compiled by South Korea’s Unification Ministry, amounted to pressing play.
That killing is one of hundreds of cases cataloged in a landmark report released last month by the Transitional Justice Working Group, a Seoul-based human rights organization, which found that executions in North Korea surged 247 percent between 2020 and 2024 compared to the previous five-year period — with at least 153 people executed or sentenced to death during those years alone.
The findings draw on interviews with 265 North Korean defectors, reporting from five media organizations with in-country contacts, and satellite imagery mapping 46 execution sites across the country. Together, they paint the most granular picture yet of a state that has quietly transformed cultural consumption into a capital offense.
