HUMAN rights in North Korea have deteriorated even further since a UN report a decade ago alleged severe repression amounting to crimes against humanity, new evidence suggests.

Evidence of life inside North Korea — officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) — is difficult to obtain, as the country continues to be one of the most isolated and repressive states in the world.

The 2014 UN study concluded that “the gravity, scale and nature of the violations of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

A new report from Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), on the tenth anniversary of the UN Commission of Inquiry, draws on testimony from six recent exiles from the country and 17 specialists in the region.

The report, North Korea: We cannot look away, says that the situation in North Korea is likely to have deteriorated further as a result of the pandemic, the regime’s prioritisation of weapons testing, and the continuing forced repatriation of North Korean refugees from neighbouring China.

New laws, including the 2020 Reactionary Ideology and Cultural Rejection law — known as the anti-reactionary thought law — ban all “foreign published materials”, including the Bible. Anyone found viewing such material faces ten years or more of what is described as “correctional labour”. Family members can also be punished through the regime principle of “guilt by association”, the law says.

“There is no freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief in the DPRK, and any citizen who expresses an opinion or a belief which differs from the regime’s propaganda faces severe punishment,” CSW’s report says. “Many of the individuals interviewed by CSW suggested that the human rights situation in the DPRK, including the right to FoRB [Freedom of Religion and Belief], has deteriorated in the past ten years.”

Christianity is particularly targeted, as it challenges the state’s ideology of Juche, which translates as self-reliance, the charity says.

One defector told CSW: “You have to believe Kim Il Sung [the founder of North Korea, who died in 1994 but has been declared its Eternal President] is a god. That’s why the North Korean regime strongly suppresses Christianity, especially Christianity, because Christianity only believes in the God, it denies every other.”

Another defector described how whole families were “disappeared” after allegations that they owned a Bible.

There are a few state-approved places of worship in North Korea, including churches, but regime experts told CSW that there was little evidence that worshippers were allowed to freely practise their faith. Most of those interviewed said that the buildings were “symbolic . . . designed to project a certain image to the international community”.

The chief executive of CSW, Scot Bower, said: “Ten years since the publication of the Commission of Inquiry’s landmark report on North Korea — which famously concluded that the ‘gravity, scale and nature’ of human-rights violations in the country ‘reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world’ — and the Kim regime remains committed to being a pariah on the international stage and acting with hostility towards global standards for human rights.

“We hope that this report generates further conversation and innovative thinking among researchers, policymakers, civil society, and funders on how to address one of the worst human-rights and humanitarian crises in the world.”

The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, reported on the state of human rights in North Korea for the UN General Assembly this month. In his report, he said that the regime had yet to take any steps, ten years after the COI report.

Between July 2023 and May 2024, he writes, “There was a noticeable escalation in the repression of the rights to freedom of expression, information, thought and conscience.”

His report refers to examples of lack of food, restrictions on movement, and testimonies about the use of the death penalty for even minor crimes, and suggests that the UN Security Council consider referring the country to the International Criminal Court for possible crimes against humanity.

North Korea has dismissed the latest UN report as “fabricated”.