Public execution of 23 North Koreans, some of whom watched K-pop music

North Korea has publicly executed at least seven people in the past decade for watching or distributing K-pop music videos in South Korea, where authorities are cracking down on what its leader Kim Jong Un calls an "evil cancer," according to a human rights report released Wednesday. .

The Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group has interviewed 683 North Korean defectors since 2015 to help determine the places in the north of the country where people have been killed and buried in public state-sanctioned executions.

In its latest report, the group said it had documented 23 public executions under the Kim regime, including those of people who traded pop music, the New York Times reported.

Since taking power a decade ago, Kim has attacked South Korean entertainment (songs, movies, and TV series) that, he says, corrupt the minds of North Koreans.

Under a law passed last December, those who distribute South Korean entertainment can face the death penalty.

One of Kim's crackdown tactics was to create an atmosphere of terror by publicly executing people found guilty of viewing or circulating banned content.

It is still impossible to know the true scale of public executions in the isolated totalitarian state, says the New York Times.

But the Transitional Justice Working Group has focused on the executions that have taken place since Kim's rise, and on those that have occurred in Hyesan, a city in North Korea and a major trading hub on the border with China.

Thousands of North Korean defectors to South Korea lived in or passed through Hyesan.

The city of 200,000 is the main gateway to outside information, including South Korean entertainment stored on computer memory cards and smuggled across the border from China.

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