South Korea is painting a horrifying picture of human rights abuses in North Korea a decade after a United Nations study castigated the North for virtually every imaginable abuse ranging from murder and enslavement to rape and sexual violence to repression of speech and dissent. 

“People in North Korea often describe feeling as though they are trapped in a matchbox, aware their lives are confined within the narrow limits and devoid of freedom,” says a defector quoted in a lengthy report on North Korean Human Rights by South Korea’s unification ministry. 

The report accompanies promulgation by President Yoon of South Korea of a “unification doctrine” that has no chance of inspiring a response by North Korea other than denials of human rights abuses and rhetorical attacks on Seoul’s alliance with Washington.

Nonetheless, the South Korean report provides a stunning, detailed update to the landmark study of a UN commission of inquiry led by an Australian jurist, Michael Kirby, which ranks as the most detailed indictment to date of the horrors inflicted by the Kim dynasty since the end of Japanese rule in 1945. 

“Some things have definitely got worse,” said Mr. Kirby in an interview with the director of the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, Greg Scarlatoiu, at Washington. “Overwhelmingly the recommendations in our report have not been implemented.”

The unification ministry report cites steady worsening of human rights for North Koreans while the government provides a rising stream of thousands of artillery shells as well as short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for the war in Ukraine in the face of UN sanctions.

The regime of the Kim dynasty’s third-generation leader, Kim Jong-un, “pursues nuclear and missile development….while neglecting the livelihood of North Korean residents,” says the report. “The people of North Korea are subjected to horrific human rights violations, including forced repatriation of defectors, as well as the suppression of outside information, intense privacy surveillance and public executions.”

The report offers what’s seen as an unrealistic goal, concluding, “When the human rights of North Korean residents are ensured, a unified Korean peninsula that is free and at peace will be realized.”

North Korea routinely denounces any criticism of its human rights record, most recently a statement by the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, calling on North Korea to “investigate, prosecute and bring to justice those accused of having committed human rights violations.”

Not surprisingly, the North’s vice foreign minister, Kim Son-gyong, denounced the report as “fabricating and distorting,” according to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency. It was, he said, “the enemy forces’ move to slander our country’s dignity and system in the name of the U.N. as a political provocation.”   

The 607-page unification ministry’s report on North Korean Human Rights, supplemented by a 372-page Report on North Korea’s Economy and Society as Perceived by 6,351 Defectors,  goes into far greater, more explicit detail than any study since that issued by Mr. Kirby’s Committee of Inquiry in 2014. 

“In 2022, I witnessed a public execution at a mine,” one defector is quoted as saying. “At the execution site someone who was presumed to be a judge announced that the individual was arrested for listening to 70 South Korean songs and watching South Korean movies.” 

Those captured by Chinese after having escaped from North Korea are often doomed. “I experienced a colleague being forcibly repatriated to North Korea after being caught by state security officials watching South Korean dramas on a mobile phone,” says yet another defector. “I heard that my colleague was executed.”

Senior officials fare no better. A party secretary and a chairman of the People’s Committee in one county “were executed without trial by firing squad for violating the law on emergency anti-epidemic work,” says the report. “They were executed for allowing quarantine residents to visit a public bathhouse.”