North Korea’s human rights situation has deteriorated over the past decade, with capital punishment broadened and increasingly enforced for offenses such as distributing foreign media, according to a new assessment published Friday by the UN Human Rights Office for the Human Rights Council.

At the heart of the findings is the expanded use of the death penalty. Since 2015, North Korea has passed a series of laws that criminalize access to outside information, making even the possession of foreign films a potential capital offense. Witnesses told UN investigators that public trials and executions have become tools of intimidation, designed not only to punish but to instill fear across communities. Technology has amplified this repression, with inspection teams carrying out sudden raids and monitoring communications on an unprecedented scale.

The UN report also documents the institutionalization of forced labor. In prisons, the military, and what are known as “shock brigades,” citizens—including thousands of orphans and street children—have been compelled to undertake dangerous and physically demanding work in coal mines and construction sites. Students, too, are pulled from classrooms to work in the fields, with officials portraying the labor as a “curriculum” but survivors describing it as backbreaking and compulsory. Fatalities during these mobilizations are not treated as tragedies to be prevented but are publicly glorified as sacrifices for the leader.

“What we have witnessed is a lost decade,” said UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk, warning that unless Pyongyang changes course, “the population will be subjected to more of the suffering, brutal repression and fear that they have endured for so long.”

The report, based on 314 interviews with escapees and corroborated by UN and civil society sources, describes a society under relentless surveillance, stripped of even the most basic freedoms. “No other population is under such restrictions in today’s world,” the report states, quoting one witness who recalled that authorities had “strengthened the crackdowns” in order to “block the people’s eyes and ears.” Earlier this year, the UN published a similar report about holding North Korea accountable for its ongoing and worsening human rights crisis.

Additionally, North Korea’s human rights situation is placed in the context of its foreign policy. In 2025, Pyongyang confirmed that it had sent soldiers to Russia under a mutual defense pact amid the war in Ukraine, underscoring its growing alignment with Moscow. That choice, the UN warns, has deepened the suffering of ordinary citizens while heightening regional insecurity.

The report calls on Pyongyang to end political prison camps, abolish the death penalty, restore family contacts across the Korean divide, halt torture in detention, and account for the many abductees and disappeared whose fates remain unknown. It also urges the international community to push harder for accountability, including through a long-delayed referral to the International Criminal Court, and to stop the forced return of North Koreans who face serious risk of abuse.