Launching a new database & report on religious freedom

On October 27 2021, we released the North Korean Religious Freedom Database and a report, ‘Persecuting Faith: Documenting religious freedom violations in North Korea’.

The culmination of 117 interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators of religious freedom violations, our investigators were able to identify 273 victims alongside 54 individual perpetrators. The names of 34 of these perpetrators have been retained together with additional identifying information. Intended to support national governments, human rights investigators, advocates, researchers, and other actors in their efforts to accelerate criminal justice efforts and end impunity for religious freedom violations in North Korea, the database contains thousands of data points, a powerful search feature to find information across bilingual datasets and within specific records, and information on individual victims and organisational and individual perpetrators.

Part of a long-term project to collect and preserve evidence of religious freedom violations in North Korea, the next scheduled release of data will take place in October 2021.