A report compiled by Korea Future, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to investigate and document human rights violations in North Korea, has exposed details relating to the detention and torture of North Korean Christians in the past decade including all documented human rights violations that occurred as recently as 2019.
The report is the result of interviews with North Korean defectors conducted between November 2019 and August 2021 and features the account of a prisoner held in a cell in North Korea for two months who noticed a distinctive pattern of behaviour among some of the fellow detainees who called themselves Christians owing to the persecution that they faced whilst incarcerated.
They “would pray in the corner of the cell that was hidden from the CCTV camera … They would escape a beating if their prayers went undetected by the correctional officers, but they would be beaten if they were caught,” the former prisoner testified.
“On one occasion when they were caught praying, they were beaten every morning for 20 consecutive days,” the witness said.
The report also disclosed multiple cases where a person was arrested for being in possession of a Bible. In one case, a young woman arrested for having a Bible was “beaten with a wooden stick until a superior intervened after hearing the victim screaming”, while in the custody of the North Korean Ministry of State Security Central Command.
North Korea has long been identified as the worst country in the world for Christian persecution, yet the closed-off nature of the country has made it difficult to get concrete data on the existence of underground Christian practice.
