North Korea last month held a rare public trial of 13 “elite” university students who were charged with acquiring and reselling porn videos from overseas. Porn is illegal in the highly repressive, secretive communist state. But the true purpose of the unusual public display was likely to “scare the public,” as a way to reinforce government control over the spread of information, according to a report by Radio Free Asia.
In 2013, North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong-un is believed to have ordered his own girlfriend executed by firing squad, for the supposed crime of producing and selling porn videos.
But because the 13 students were all children of high-ranking government officials, they were doled out a far less severe sentence, according to a source who revealed the trial to RFA.
The alleged collegiate porn purveyors were punished by being subjected to “harsh criticism and humiliating the students and their parents.”
The trial also apparently highlighted the grossly unequal application of justice in North Korea, according to the source, who said that “ordinary colege students” would at minimum have been “sent to a correctional labor center or disciplinary labor camps,” for their crimes of distributing pornography.
Under North Korean law, porn-related crimes carry sentences of “less than two years” to “less than five years” in the country’s brutal prison labor camps.
Almost no North Koreans have access to the internet, though a heavily censored version of the global network is accessible from some university computers. The country has created a government-run intranet, however—a closed network that works only inside North Korea, allowing no access to sites or communications from elsewhere in the world.
As a result, black market porn and other unauthorized content is distributed via thumb drives and discs, in what RFA described as a “thriving market.” The students, all computer science specialists, allegedly acquired the porn videos which were "mostly smuggled in by the children of diplomats and embassy staff from overseas," and re-edited them for sale, garnering as much as $100 in United States currency for a single thumb drive.
The purpose of the public trial, according the RFA source, was to “root out the decadent bourgeois lifestyle among the young” in order to prevent “handing over the socialist system, as a whole, to the enemies of the revolution.”
Photo By The White House / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
