Friday, January 19, 2024 – Newly released rare footage shows the Secretive Republic of North Korea publicly sentencing two teenage boys to 12 years of hard labour for watching South Korean movies popularly known as K-dramas.
The footage, which appears to have been filmed in 2022,
shows two 16-year-old boys handcuffed in front of hundreds of students at an
outdoor stadium.
It also shows uniformed police officers reprimanding the
boys for not "deeply reflecting on their mistakes".
South Korean entertainment, including TV shows, is banned in
the North.
But some people in the country are prepared to risk severe
punishment to access K-dramas, which have a huge global audience.
North Korea forbids photos, videos and other evidence of
life in the country from being leaked to the outside world, signifying how such
footage is very rare.
This video was provided to the BBC by the South and North
Development (Sand), a research institute that works with defectors from the
North.
In the video, a narrator is repeating state propaganda.
"The rotten puppet regime's culture has spread even to teenagers,"
says the voice, in an apparent reference to South Korea. "They are just 16
years old, but they ruined their own future," it adds.
The boys were also named by officers and had their addresses
revealed.
In the past, minors who broke the law in this way would be
sent to youth labour camps rather than put behind bars, and the punishment was
usually less than five years.
But in 2020, Pyongyang enacted a law to make watching or
distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.
See the video below
Footage shows teenagers sentenced to 12 years imprisonment with hard labour in for watching K-drama pic.twitter.com/SY6DJ3ocOO
— DAILY POST 🇰🇪 (@TheKenyanPost) January 19, 2024
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