Think tank unveils N. Korean court ruling ordering public execution

[unreal.livejournal.com]

A South Korean state-run think tank on Thursday unveiled a North Korean court ruling sentencing a man to public execution, suggesting the totalitarian regime uses the punishment as part of its legal system.

The Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) said it included images of the document in a 20-minute-long DVD it recently produced to cover North Korea's serious human rights abuses. The communist regime has long been accused of public executions, torture, and holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.

Pyongyang denies the accusations, calling them a U.S.-led attempt to topple its regime.

The DVD, titled "No Tears," was produced based on the eyewitness accounts of North Korean defectors. More than 21,000 North Koreans have fled poverty and repression in their homeland to settle in the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

In the ruling, dated September 2010, North Korea's top court sentenced a 40-year-old man to public execution on charges of stealing six cows, or deliberate damage to national wealth.

It is the first time such a document has been released in South Korea, according to KINU. The institute said it has been difficult to find the legal grounds for public executions in North Korea's criminal code, but the ruling, which it obtained from a defector, shows the existence of legal procedures that include the punishment. KINU estimates that at least 60 public executions were carried out in the North last year.

Source: koreaherald

Comments

[suzieeq-luv.livejournal.com]

Had to look up KINU. Found out it stands for Korea Institute for National Unification.
Never knew about this. Learned something new today :S

[hopeandmemory.livejournal.com]

Pyongyang denies the accusations, calling them a U.S.-led attempt to topple its regime.

And Oceania's never been at war with Eastasia. Okay, North Korea.

Seriously, though, this is despicable. It's bad enough that they torture and imprison people for completely ridiculous reasons, now they want to start executing people in public? That's barbaric. I didn't think the North Korean government could sink any lower, but yet again I am surprised and disgusted. If you didn't starve your people in favor of your leader, this poor man wouldn't have had to steal the fucking cows.

God, this shit gets me so worked up.

[ginevragirl.livejournal.com]

Me too. It pisses me off that the world can basically do nothing to help the poor people that are stuck there in North Korea. Ugggggggh.

[hopeandmemory.livejournal.com]

And what agitates me more is that China can repatriate escaped N. Korean refugees. I'm not sure what law that violates, specifically (the Geneva Conventions? Because NK and SK are technically still at war? I'm not sure), but it's illegal to return someone to a place in which they are being mistreated for no reason. And we can't fuck with China because their military spending is ridiculous and they're responsible for manufacturing a shitload of products for the west. The economic and military repercussions to putting sanctions on China are too risky. Fuck. And then these poor refugees get punished for trying to leave. It's so Orwellian, it's really disturbing.

[ginevragirl.livejournal.com]

It just blows my mind that countries that are run like N.K. can still exist in today's world. I just...don't get it.

And the Chinese govt scares me. Lol. Mainly cause I don't fully understand it, and all the stuff I do hear is like bad. Lol.