North Korea has committed horrific human rights violations including executing children and pregnant women, carrying out human experiments and forcibly sterilising disabled people, a South Korean report has claimed.
The pariah state has also put citizens to death for being homosexual, for their religion and for trying to flee the country, the report by the South's Ministry of Unification states.
Horrifying testimony also reveals the regime forced nurses to write up 'a list of dwarfs' and conducted hysterectomies on a woman with dwarfism, as well as human experiments.
The extensive 450-page report details egregious human rights abuses in North Korea, including the right to life and liberty, as well as freedom from slavery, torture and other inhumane treatment.
It is based on damning testimony from more than 500 North Koreans who fled from their homeland and was collected from 2017 to 2022.
n a move that is sure to infuriate despot Kim Jong-un and his regime, the ministry revealed its yearly report to the public for the first time ever today as it aims to lift the lid on the North's 'gruesome' human rights abuses.
Chilling testimony from today's report states that a six-month pregnant woman was executed by the regime.
The reason for her killing was said to be that a widely circulated video showed her pointing at a portrait of the late Kim Il-sung while dancing in her home.
More disturbing testimony revealed that six teenagers, aged 16 and 17, were executed by shooting.
They were said to have been charged over watching video footage originating from South Korea and smoking opium at a stadium in the city of Wonsan, Gangwon Province.
It also details that the regime carried out human experiments, with officials at the Ministry of Social Security allegedly blackmailing families into letting their relatives become human test subjects under the threat of sending them to prison camps.
Human subjects were reported to have secretly been fed sleeping pills and forcibly taken to a facility called Hospital 83 to undergo various experiments.
Disabled people, particularly those with dwarfism, were also deprived of their human rights and had medical procedures conducted on them against their wills.
In 2015, nurses at one hospital were reportedly told to create a 'list of dwarfs' which was then used to prevent people with dwarfism from giving birth.
One woman with dwarfism was allegedly forced to undergo a hysterectomy - a surgical procedure to remove her womb and prevent her from having a child - in 2017.
Rampant state-led rights abuses were said to have taken place in communities, prison camps and elsewhere, including public executions, torture and arbitrary arrests.
Women in detention were subjected to inhumane conditions including torture, forced labor, sexual violence and starvation.
Detention facilities saw deaths and torture occurring regularly and some people were summarily executed after being caught trying to cross the border, the South Korean ministry said.