executes

‘Mass surveillance’ tech has enabled world’s most restrictive state to exert ‘control in all parts of life’, UN Human Rights Office says.

North Korea has further tightened its grip on its population over the past decade, executing people for activities like sharing foreign TV dramas, according to a major United Nations report.

The UN Human Rights Office said on Friday that tech-enabled state repression under the Kim dynasty, which has governed with absolute power for seven decades, had grown over a decade of “suffering, repression, and increased fear”.

“No other population is under such restrictions in today’s world,” concluded the agency’s report, which is based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had fled the country and reported the further erosion of freedoms.

“To block the people’s eyes and ears, they strengthened the crackdowns. It was a form of control aimed at eliminating even the smallest signs of dissatisfaction or complaint,” recounted one escapee, cited in the report.

James Heenan, head of the UN Human Rights Office for North Korea, told a Geneva briefing that the number of executions for both normal and political crimes had increased since COVID-era restrictions.

An unspecified number of people had already been executed under new laws imposing the death penalty for distributing foreign TV series, including the popular K-Dramas from South Korea, he added.

The clampdown has been aided by the expansion of “mass surveillance” systems through technological advances, which have subjected citizens to “control in all parts of life” over the past 10 years, the report said.

Heenan also reported that children were being made to work in forced labour, including so-called “shock brigades” for tough sectors such as coal mining and construction.

“They’re often children from the lower level of society, because they’re the ones who can’t bribe their way out of it, and these shock brigades are engaged in often very hazardous and dangerous work,” he said.

Last year, the UN indicated that the forced labour could, in some cases, amount to slavery, making it a crime against humanity.

The sweeping review comes more than a decade after a landmark UN report documented executions, rapes, torture, deliberate starvation, and the detention of between 80,000 and 120,000 people in prison camps.

The new report covered developments since 2014, noting the government’s adoption of new laws, policies and procedures providing a legal framework for repression.

UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement: “If the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] continues on its current trajectory, the population will be subjected to more suffering, brutal repression and fear.”

North Korea’s Geneva diplomatic mission and its London embassy have not yet commented on the report.

Israel has carried out a precision strike targeting the top leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital Doha. This appears to be the first time Israeli forces have openly attacked in Qatar, marking a significant expansion in the country’s operations against Hamas.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israel Security Agency (ISA; better known as Shin Bet) issued a joint statement after explosions rocked an area of Doha earlier today. This all comes as Hamas negotiators have been considering a Gaza ceasefire proposal put forth by the U.S. government.

Takahiro Shiraishi was hanged for the murders of eight women and one man whose body parts he concealed in his small apartment.

Japan has executed a man who was found guilty of killing and dismembering nine people he made contact with on social media, the first use of capital punishment in the country in nearly three years.

Takahiro Shiraishi was hanged on Friday after he was sentenced to death for the 2017 murders of eight women and one man in his apartment in Zama city in Kanagawa near Tokyo.

He was dubbed the “Twitter killer” as he had contacted his victims via the social media platform, now known as X.

Shiraishi admitted to committing the murders after reaching out and offering to help people – who were contemplating suicide – to die. He had stashed bits of the bodies of his nine victims in coolers around his small apartment, according to media reports.

Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorised Shiraishi’s hanging, said he made the decision after careful examination of the case, taking into account the convict’s “extremely selfish” motive for crimes that “caused great shock and unrest to society”.

The execution on Friday was the first in Japan since July 2022 of a man sentenced to death for a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district in 2008.

It was also the first time the death penalty was carried out since Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s government was inaugurated last October.

Last September, a Japanese court acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who had spent the world’s longest time on death row. The court found he was wrongfully convicted of crimes committed nearly 60 years ago.

One of the highest-profile executions in Japan was carried out in 2018 of the guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system that killed 14 people and made thousands ill.

Capital punishment is carried out by hanging in Japan, and prisoners are notified of their execution just hours before it is carried out, which has long been decried by human rights groups for the stress it puts on death-row prisoners.

Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty.

There is strong public support for the practice in Japan. A government survey in 2024 of 1,800 respondents found that 83 percent viewed the death penalty as “unavoidable”.

McALESTER, Okla. — Oklahoma executed a man Thursday whose transfer to state custody was expedited by the Trump administration.

John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, received a three-drug lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and was pronounced dead at 10:11 a.m., prison officials said. Hanson was sentenced to die after he was convicted of carjacking, kidnapping and killing a Tulsa woman in 1999.

“Peace to everyone,” Hanson said while strapped to a gurney inside the prison’s death chamber.

The execution began at 10:01 a.m. After the lethal drugs began to flow, a doctor entered the death chamber at 10:06 a.m. and declared him unconscious.

Hanson, whose name in some federal court records is George John Hanson, had been serving a life sentence in federal prison in Louisiana for several unrelated federal convictions. Federal officials transferred him to Oklahoma’s custody in March to follow through on President Trump’s sweeping executive order to more actively support the death penalty.

Hanson’s attorneys argued in a last-minute appeal that he did not receive a fair clemency hearing last month, claiming that one of the board members who denied him clemency was biased because he worked for the Tulsa County district attorney’s office when Hanson was prosecuted. A district court judge this week issued a temporary stay halting the execution, but that was later vacated.

Prosecutors alleged Hanson and accomplice Victor Miller kidnapped Mary Bowles from a Tulsa shopping mall. Prosecutors alleged the pair drove Bowles to a gravel pit near Owasso, where Miller shot and killed property owner Jerald Thurman. The two then drove Bowles a short distance away, where Hanson shot and killed Bowles, according to prosecutors. Miller received a no-parole life prison sentence for his role.

Thurman’s son, Jacob Thurman, witnessed Thursday’s execution and said it was the culmination of “the longest nightmare of our lives.”

“All families lose in this situation,” he said. “No one’s a winner.”

Bowles’ niece, Sara Mooney, expressed frustration that the litigation over Hanson’s death sentence dragged on for decades, calling it an “expensive and ridiculous exercise.”

“Capital punishment is not an effective form of justice when it takes 26 years,” she said.

During last month’s clemency hearing, Hanson expressed remorse for his involvement in the crimes and apologized to the victims’ families.

“I’m not an evil person,” Hanson said via a video link from the prison. “I was caught in a situation I couldn’t control. I can’t change the past, but I would if I could.”

Hanson’s attorneys acknowledged that he participated in the kidnapping and carjacking, but said there was no definitive evidence that he shot and killed Bowles. They painted Hanson as a troubled youth with autism who was controlled and manipulated by the domineering Miller.

Both Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Gentner Drummond and his predecessor, John O’Connor, had sought Hanson’s transfer during President Biden’s administration, but the U.S. Bureau of Prisons denied it, saying the transfer was not in the public interest.

Murphy writes for the Associated Press.