James Heenan, head of the UN Human Rights Office for North Korea, told a Geneva briefing that the number of executions for both normal and political crimes had increased since COVID-era restrictions.
An unspecified number of people had already been executed under new laws imposing the death penalty for distributing foreign TV series, including the popular K-Dramas from South Korea, he added.
If we find you watching Alien: Earth, we will take you out.
My first ever encounter with North Korea as a concept, was when I was a little kid, and there was a thing set up at the local library by some reactionary NGO, “donate your old flash drives” for exactly that purpose.
I’d like to say I went home and looked up North Korea and found information that doesn’t come from the CIA and their assets, but I gotta tell ya, I was like eight, and I pretty much stopped thinking about it after my mum and I left the library building. Like any seven or eight year old would. I suspect I only remember it because they had it set up with little slots on the big board to plug sticks into, and each slot was overlaid with a photo of the country’s leader so it looked like the sticks were stuck into his mouth, and that’s really freaking funny no matter whose mouth it is, when you’re seven or eight years old and find that kind of humor to be the height of comedy.
So yeah, lots of reactionary nuts do this. Or at least, it was super common back then.