North Korea has executed citizens, including students, for watching South Korean television dramas such as Squid Game, according to new testimony collected by Amnesty International, which says the regime continues to use extreme punishment to suppress foreign media and enforce ideological control.
In a recent report based on interviews with 25 North Korean escapees, Amnesty said people caught consuming South Korean films, dramas or music faced punishments ranging from long prison terms and forced labor to execution. Several interviewees described incidents in which students were among those killed, with children sometimes required to attend executions as part of what the authorities framed as political indoctrination.
The testimonies were gathered from defectors who left North Korea before 2020, most of whom were between 15 and 25 years old at the time of their escape. Amnesty said the accounts showed consistent patterns across different regions and time periods, despite the difficulty of independently verifying individual cases due to the country's isolation.
The report centers on enforcement of Pyongyang's "Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Act," a law designed to block outside cultural influence. Under the statute, watching or possessing South Korean media can result in five to 15 years of forced labor, while distributing or organizing viewings can lead to harsher penalties, including death.
One defector told Amnesty they had heard from relatives in Yanggang Province that "people, including high school students," were executed for watching Squid Game. Other interviewees described similar incidents involving public shootings staged as warnings to local communities.
Amnesty's Deputy Regional Director Sarah Brooks said the punishments were "both arbitrary and deeply corrupt," noting that enforcement often depended on personal connections or bribes rather than clear legal standards. According to the testimonies, wealthier families were sometimes able to reduce sentences or avoid detention by paying officials.
Former residents also described the role of a special enforcement unit commonly referred to as the "109 Group," which conducts warrantless searches of homes and mobile phones for foreign content. Those caught can be detained immediately, while schools and workplaces are sometimes ordered to organize public punishments as demonstrations of loyalty to the state.
The allegations echo earlier reporting. In 2021, Radio Free Asia said a man was sentenced to death for smuggling Squid Game into the country on a USB drive, while students who watched it received long prison terms. Amnesty cautioned that such cases are difficult to confirm independently but said the consistency of accounts strengthens their credibility.
At a June 2025 session hosted by the United Nations Human Rights Office in Seoul, defectors including Kim Il-hyuk testified that people had been executed by firing squad for distributing South Korean dramas and K-pop, sometimes with multiple victims in a single event.
Amnesty and other rights groups argue that these practices violate international treaties North Korea has ratified, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The organization said forcing children to witness executions and criminalizing access to information underscored what it described as a broader strategy of fear and control.
