Human rights in North Korea

The human rights record of North Korea is widely considered to be among the worst in the world and has been globally condemned, with the United Nations and groups such as Human Rights Watch all critical of it. Amnesty International considers North Korea to have no contemporary parallel with respect to violations of liberty.

The citizens have no right to free speech. Only media providers operated by the government are deemed legal. According to reports from Amnesty International and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, by 2017 an estimated 200,000 prisoners were incarcerated in camps that were dedicated to political crimes, and were subjected to forced labour, physical abuse, and execution.

The North Korean government strictly monitors the activities of foreign visitors. Aid workers are subjected to considerable scrutiny and they are also excluded from places and regions which the government does not want them to enter. Since citizens cannot freely leave the country, the nation's human rights record has mostly been constructed from stories from refugees and defectors. The government's position, expressed through the Korean Central News Agency, is that international criticism of its human rights record is a pretext for overthrowing its Juche-based system, while the abuses of its critics go unpunished.

The General Assembly of the United Nations has since 2003 annually adopted a resolution condemning the country's human rights record. The resolution of December 19, 2011, passed by a vote of 123–16 with 51 abstentions, urged the government in Pyongyang to end its "systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights", which included public executions and arbitrary detentions. North Korea rejected the resolution, saying it was politically motivated and based upon untrue fabrications. In February 2014, a UN special commission published a detailed, 400-page account based on first-hand testimonies documenting "unspeakable atrocities" committed by the North Korean regime.