North Korea intensifies executions for watching K-pop and South Korean films
North Korea has executed people for K-pop and South Korean films, including a 22-year-old killed after 70 songs and three movies. The crackdown widened after the 2020 border closure.
North Korea has turned South Korean pop culture into a capital crime in some cases, publicly executing people for watching K-dramas, listening to K-pop and sharing South Korean films. South Korea’s Ministry of Unification cited one especially stark case in its 2024 human rights report: a 22-year-old man from South Hwanghae Province was executed in 2022 after listening to 70 South Korean songs, watching three South Korean movies and distributing them to others.
The repression sharpened after North Korea sealed its borders in January 2020 to contain COVID-19. The Transitional Justice Working Group said executions surged again after that closure, after a period of restraint under international scrutiny. Its 2026 report said it analyzed 144 cases, including 136 executions involving 358 people and at least eight death sentencings involving nine more people whose execution status is unknown.
Culture was only one front in the campaign. North Korea’s 2020 law on rejecting “reactionary ideology and culture” can bring up to 10 years of hard labor for bringing in and spreading outside culture and information. The ministry also pointed to tighter controls under the 2021 Youth Education Guarantee Act and the 2023 law protecting Pyongyang’s dialect and culture. Testimony cited in the report said the person who first brings in South Korean media faces the harshest punishment, “invariably” execution by firing squad.
The deaths were not confined to one region. The Transitional Justice Working Group said executions took place across 34 cities and counties, including Hyesan City in Ryanggang Province, Pyongyang, Chongjin City in North Hamgyong Province, Hamhung City in South Hamgyong Province and Hoeryong City. The group said its findings drew on testimony from 265 North Korean defectors and reporting from five North Korea-focused media outlets with inside sources, spanning Kim Jong-un’s rule from Dec. 17, 2011, to Dec. 16, 2024.
The U.S. Department of State said North Korea maintained control through executions, physical abuse, enforced disappearances and collective punishment, and said there were numerous reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings during the year. Taken together, the reports point to a state that used the emergency conditions of the pandemic to widen its reach into private life, policing not just movement and speech but taste, music and access to foreign culture.
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