North Korean defector Kim Eun-joo / Courtesy of Kim Eun-joo

Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea.

“I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.”

The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

For Kim, that memory is not just trauma but a key to understanding of how Pyongyang uses death itself to intimidate and control its people.

“The regime uses the executions to numb the feelings and ideas of human compassion and respect for life. That cruelty is indoctrinated and framed as something necessary,” she said. “Even at 9, I knew that expressing discomfort or sadness could be dangerous.”

In her view, the point of these executions is less about punishing an individual offender than about making a spectacle for everyone to see. By forcing the family of the condemned to stand at the very front and watch, authorities turn the scene into a form of intimidation against the living, she said.

The crimes that lead to such brutal executions are often offenses that, here in South Korea, would not even result in a prison term.

“The cases I witnessed were mostly survival-related — a person who slaughtered and ate a cow, a man who killed someone over 30 kilograms of corn and a couple who tried to peel copper off a Kim family monument and sell it to buy food for their children,” she said.

Today, rights researchers say public executions are still carried out in North Korea, with a wider range of offenses. According to a report published by the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group, there has been a rise in executions documented for watching or distributing South Korea’s media content in recent years.

North Korean defector Kim Eun-joo speaks at the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, June 30. Courtesy of Kim Eun-joo

Looking back on her appearance in Paris, Kim said she felt she played at least a small part by exposing how human life in the North is brutally turned into a political instrument. Putting those scenes of public killing into the open and in front of the international community, she added, was one way to make it harder for the world to look away.

Kim is not calling for the immediate abolition of the death penalty in North Korea. Instead, she says the most urgent steps are to ban public executions, especially in front of children, to ensure any death sentences follow basic international standards and to require officials to record and report executions that take place inside prisons and other detention facilities.

“Simply put, it is important to secure transparency for the death penalty, because only then can we move on to the next stage,” she said.

Kim believes the world still understands North Korean abuses only through a rough outline. The fact that its death penalty system is being discussed at a global abolition congress only now, she said, shows how late that conversation has started.

“In that sense, I hope to work with organizations so that, internationally, the voices of North Korean defectors can be heard more widely,” she added.