Four in five North Korean escapees interviewed for a new report by a South Korea-based research group said they witnessed a public execution in their lifetime. More than half said they’d been forced to watch one.
All the while, a group in South Korea has been laying the groundwork for a day when the North Korean regime will have to account for acts that thecrimes against humanity. As in post-apartheid South Africa and the former Yugoslavia, researchers are betting there will come a day of reckoning before international law for North Korea’s leaders.
The continued practice of public executions is a key tool through which North Korea maintains control over its people, said research director Sarah Son, one of the report’s authors. Along with Iran and Saudi Arabia, North Korea is one of the few nations that continue to conduct public executions. The regime has acknowledged to the United Nations in the past that public executions do take place but “only in exceptional cases, where the crime committed was exceptionally grave.”
The vast majority were executed by firing squad, with a small number of reported hangings, which appear to have been largely discontinued since 2005, according to the report. The most common sites of public executions were riverbanks, fields and other open spaces, often with hundreds but sometimes more than a thousand watching.
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