North Korean Boat Owner Executed for Listening to Radio Free Asia

Originally published 2020-12-23.

In December 2020, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that North Korean authorities had executed a fishing fleet owner from the port city of Chongjin for secretly listening to its Korean-language broadcasts. According to RFA's sources inside the country, the man, identified only by his surname Choi and described as being in his 40s, was shot by a firing squad in mid-October 2020 in front of roughly 100 boat captains and fish-processing managers. The charge, as relayed by RFA, was an attempt at subversion against the ruling party.

The account cannot be independently confirmed, which is true of almost every report that leaves North Korea through informal channels. What can be checked is the context: the laws that make foreign media a serious crime, the reasons fishermen are especially likely to hear outside stations, and the long record of public executions documented by the United Nations and human rights researchers. That context is what makes the report plausible, and also what makes careful wording important.

What Radio Free Asia reported about the Chongjin case

RFA's Korean Service published the story on 17 December 2020, citing a law enforcement official in North Hamgyong province and a local resident who said the execution was widely known. Their description differs in some details from versions that spread online afterwards, so it is worth setting out what the broadcaster actually said.

• Who: a man named Choi, in his 40s, who reportedly owned more than 50 fishing boats working out of a fishery base in Chongjin.
• When and where: mid-October 2020, at the fishery base itself, which RFA linked to the Central Party's Bureau 39, an office widely associated with raising foreign currency for the leadership. Some retellings placed the shooting against a wall in a town centre; RFA's sources described the base.
• Why: Choi had reportedly begun listening to RFA at 24, while serving as a military radio operator, and later confessed to more than 15 years of listening, including while fishing far out at sea.
• How he was caught: according to the sources, a crew member who resented his treatment reported him to the security services.
• Wider punishment: party officials, the base administration and the security officers who had cleared Choi to work at sea were said to have been dismissed or discharged.

RFA's source interpreted the public execution as a warning to others, saying the authorities wanted residents to understand that listening to outside radio stations means death.

Why fishermen hear foreign broadcasts

Ordinary North Koreans are not supposed to be able to tune in to foreign stations at all. Radios and television sets sold or issued inside the country are fixed to state frequencies and sealed, and tampering with the seal is itself an offence. Local party officials have, according to defectors, been tasked with checking those seals during inspections.

Ships are different. A vessel working distant fishing grounds needs real communication equipment, and the crews are far from the neighbourhood watch groups that monitor life on shore. RFA's report noted that Korean-language programmes are common listening at sea for fishermen and merchant sailors. Choi's background as a military radio operator would also have given him the skills to find and hold a signal.

The timing matters too. In 2020 the state was pressing fishing crews to bring back bigger catches to ease food shortages made worse by sanctions and the pandemic border closure. That pressure put more boats on the water for longer, with more opportunity to listen.

The law behind the crackdown

The report landed in the same month that North Korea tightened its rules on outside information. On 4 December 2020, according to state media, the Supreme People's Assembly adopted a law usually translated as the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture. It sets penalties ranging from forced labour to death for possessing or spreading films, music, publications and broadcasts from "hostile" countries, a category that explicitly takes in South Korea, Japan and the United States.

Choi's case predates that law by several weeks, so it was not a prosecution under it. Still, RFA and human rights groups saw the two events as part of the same drive: a government worried that information from abroad, especially South Korean pop culture and news, was eroding its control.

Why Radio Free Asia is popular inside North Korea

RFA is a non-profit broadcaster funded by the United States Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It began broadcasting in 1996, and its Korean service, launched in 1997, transmitted several hours a day on shortwave from the Northern Mariana Islands and on medium wave from South Korea.

Two refugees interviewed for the original report said listeners prefer RFA because the signal is clear and the programmes are in natural Korean. They also said that the official warnings about RFA in compulsory "resident education" sessions had the opposite effect, making people more curious about what the station was saying. Other information arrives on USB sticks and SD cards, mostly entertainment, but news about the outside world still largely comes through radio.

RFA's own position has changed since 2020. Its federal grant was terminated in March 2025, the Korean service was suspended that July, and news operations stopped later that year. Broadcasts to North Korea partially resumed in early 2026. For North Korean listeners, that interruption meant one of very few independent Korean-language sources went quiet for months.

How reliable are reports like this?

Reporting from North Korea depends on people who risk their lives by talking. Sources are anonymous by necessity, names are partial, and details cannot be checked on the ground. Some well-known stories from the country have later turned out to be wrong; others, dismissed at first, were confirmed years later by defector testimony or satellite imagery.

A sensible way to read the Chongjin report is to separate three layers:

1. The allegation itself, which rests on a small number of unnamed sources contacted by one outlet and has not been confirmed by any government or independent body.
2. The pattern, which is well documented. A 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry found systematic and gross human rights violations, many of which may amount to crimes against humanity. The Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group mapped at least 323 sites linked to public executions in a 2019 study.
3. The legal framework, which North Korea has published itself, including penalties up to death for foreign media.

Taken together, the case is plausible and consistent with known practice, but it remains a reported allegation, and the specific details should be held lightly.

Life under one of the world's most closed governments

North Korea is often described as the most isolated state in the world. Leaving without permission is illegal, the public has almost no access to the internet beyond a closed national intranet, and the leadership is the focus of an intense personality cult. The UN inquiry estimated that 80,000 to 120,000 people were held in political prison camps at the time of its report; some rights groups give higher figures.

Some popular summaries say the two Koreas have been at war for 70 years. The more precise picture is that fighting in the Korean War stopped with an armistice in July 1953, and no peace treaty has ever been signed. The border remains one of the most heavily militarised in the world, and the North has developed nuclear weapons that it describes as a guarantee of the state's survival.

Against that background, a radio is more than a gadget. For many North Koreans it is the only way to hear that the world beyond the border works differently, which is exactly why the state treats listening as a threat.

What readers can take from the story

• Treat single-source reports from North Korea as allegations, and look for the outlet's own wording rather than viral retellings, which often add or change details.
• The broader pattern, including public executions and severe penalties for foreign media, is documented by the UN and by North Korea's own laws.
• Independent Korean-language broadcasting is one of the few channels of outside information for ordinary people, and its funding has become politically contested.

Sources: Radio Free Asia: North Korea executes fishing fleet owner for listening to RFA (December 2020); Wikipedia: Radio Free Asia; Wikipedia: Human rights in North Korea.