Police officers entered the home of Lim Ok Kyung, a smuggler in her forties from North Korea’s South Hwanghae province. The police were looking for, and found, home appliances smuggled from China. Lim Ok Kyung was detained at a detention and interrogation facility (kuryujang) run by the police near the border. Her husband, a mid-level party member, had good connections, so she was released after 10 days. Yet that did not prevent the investigator or police guards from beating her.
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The investigator didn’t hit me at the waiting cell (daegisil). But they hit me during questioning.… First, they said to write everything, everything from the moment of my birth until the present. I had to write my whole story
for hours.
The next day the preliminary examination officer came in, said what I wrote was a lie, and asked me to write it again.... When things didn’t match, he slapped me in the face.... Beatings were hardest the first day… [At the individual cell,] some guards who passed by would hit me with their hands or kick me with their boots.…. For five days, they forced me to stay standing and didn’t let me sleep…. When a police guard I knew came in, they’d give me candy saying I was suffering, they’d let me sit and rest. But when the guards I didn’t know were in charge of watching me… they wouldn’t let me sleep.
Yoon Young Cheol, at the time a government worker in his thirties, also experienced the arbitrariness of the North Korean legal system. On a winter night in 2011, five men dressed as police officers entered his home and took him to the office of the secret police (bowibu) in the city bordering China where he lived. Yoon Young Cheol was detained and, before he was even questioned, severely beaten. It was only the next day that he found out that somebody had accused him of being a spy. He told Human Rights Watch:
They put me in a waiting cell. It was small and I was alone. They searched my body. Afterwards, the head of the city’s secret police department, the party’s political affairs head, and the investigator came in. It was very serious, but I didn’t know why. They just beat me up for 30 minutes, they kicked me with their boots, and punched me with their fists, everywhere on my body.…
The next day they moved me to the next room, which was a detention and interrogation facility cell, and my preliminary examination started. But the questioning didn’t really have any protocols or procedures. They just beat me…. The preliminary examiner hit me violently first… I asked, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ but I didn’t get an answer…. As the questioning went on, I found out that I had been reported as a spy. Violent beatings and hitting were constant in the beginning of [the preliminary examination] questioning for one month. They kicked me with their boots, punched me with their fists or hit me with a thick stick, all over my body. After [when they had most of my confession ready], they were gentler.
Six months later, Yoon Young Cheol says the secret police concluded that he was not a spy and passed him over to the police. The police then investigated him for two more months on allegations of smuggling forbidden products such as herbal medicines, copper, or gold. After a summary trial, Yoon Young Cheol was sentenced to unpaid hard labor for five years. He explained that anybody making noteworthy amounts of money in North Korea can easily be found guilty of crimes, as most profit-making activities can be considered illegal.