North Korea condemns man to death for distributing “Round 6” series in the country

North Korea sentenced to death a man who smuggled and sold copies of the series “Round 6”, gives Netflix, service prohibited in the country. According to information from Radio Free Asia, authorities discovered seven high school students watching the South Korean production that reached the streaming platform’s record audience.

The man responsible for the smuggling reportedly took a copy of “Round 6” from China to North Korea and sold flash drives with the series’ contents. According to the Agency, the sentence will be carried out by a firing squad.

One of the students, who bought the series, was sentenced to life in prison by the North Korean authoritarian regime. The other six will face a five-year sentence of forced labor, while the principal, a secretary and a school teacher have lost their jobs and risk being banished to work in remote mines.

According to an anonymous police source consulted by the RFA, the investigation will continue with the objective of identifying the origin of the contraband and punishing other people directly or indirectly involved in the incident. “Other professors are worried that this will also happen to them, if any of their students are caught in the investigation”, says the source.

The teenagers were reportedly caught by the government arm responsible for detaining illegal viewers, the Surveillance Bureau Group 109. This is the first time that minors have been convicted since the “elimination of reactionary thinking and culture” law was passed in the country. .

Formulated in 2020, it provides for the death penalty for anyone who “watches, maintains or distributes media from capitalist countries, mainly from South Korea and the United States”. With that, the perspective is of new and severe condemnations by the government of Kim Jong Un.

According to a report released by the Washington Post in 2019, North Korea’s dictatorial regime considers South Korean K-pop and US pop music as threats to the government that would encourage the country’s population to flee.

The report also released a survey by South Korea’s Unification Media Group, which polled 200 North Korean refugees in South Korea: 90% of them said they used foreign media when they lived in the neighboring country and 75% said they knew someone who was punished for that reason.

Through a dystopian plot, the South Korean production “Round 6” explores the poverty situation in South Korea, the relations with China and with the North Korean fugitives.

The series was also censored in China, but in October the population managed to bypass government controls and “Round 6” became a sensation there as well. Launched in September, the series is the most watched series in Netflix history and has played in 142 million homes worldwide.

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