Images from North Korea are always rare, and those revealed by the South Korean BBC will not give a more rosy image of Kim Jong-un’s regime. In a video of around thirty seconds, we can observe two 16-year-old minors handcuffed in front of an audience of students, sitting in the stands of an outdoor stadium. The hundreds of young people have their faces covered with a mask, which suggests that the scene took place in 2022 during the coronavirus epidemic. Police officers can be seen reprimanding them during public trials.
Their fault? Having watched South Korean films and clips for several months, which is strictly prohibited in North Korea. “They were seduced by foreign culture… and ended up ruining their own future,” says the voice-over of the document revealed by the Institute for Southern and Northern Development (SAND), which is responsible for integrating defectors from the North to South Korean society.
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Kim Jong-un’s regime issued a law in 2020 “against reactionary thoughts.” Any consumption or viewing of foreign content is prohibited, the sanction being up to the death penalty. Until then, offending minors were punished with forced labor for up to five years.
According to the narrator of the video, the two young men were sentenced by Pyongyang to 12 years of forced labor. The clip was then distributed in North Korea, according to the think-tank SAND, for the purposes of ideological education and to urge citizens not to view “decadent recordings”.
