North Korea’s human rights: What’s not being talked about (2019)

The state controls everything, and actively spies on its citizens using a vast surveillance and informer network.

North Koreans get all their news, entertainment and information from state media, which unfailingly praises the leadership. According to RSF, citizens can be sent to prison for viewing, reading or listening to content provided by international media outlets.

Internet access is available for the elite few in the capital, Pyongyang, who lead relatively comfortable lives. Others may have restricted access. The country has its own very basic intranet - a closed network which certain people are allowed to use.

“North Korea has been said to be the world’s biggest open prison camp,” said Brad Adams [Asia director of Human Rights Watch]. “I don’t think that’s unfair.”

Foreign nationals in North Korea have been arrested and detained for extended periods of time - often kept as prisoners for political reasons and used as diplomatic pawns at opportune moments.

A significant majority of North Koreans undertake unpaid labour at some point in their lives, according to a HRW report. Former students who defected from North Korea told HRW that their schools forced them to work for free on farms twice a year - at ploughing and harvest time - for one month at a time.

Discrimination against women very much exists, but “there isn’t a way to measure inequality in the North like how you measure the wage gap between males and females”, says Arnold Fang [a researcher from Amnesty International]

Reports are also rampant of women facing torture, rape and other sexual abuses while held in detention facilities - and of widespread sexual abuse in the military.