North Korea: Two-year old boy sentenced to life in prison after parents found with Bible
by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – A two-year-old boy and his entire family in North Korea have been sentenced to life imprisonment after authorities found a Bible in the possession of the child’s parents, the US state department’s Commission on International Religious Freedom said in its annual report for 2022.
Ruled by the brutal communist dictatorship of Supreme Leader Kim Jung Un, North Korea ranks number one on the US Open Doors World Watch List 2023 of top 50 countries where Christians are persecuted.
According to the USCIRF report, North Korea has continued to “execute, torture, arrest and physically abuse people for their religious activities.” Around 70,000 Christians are imprisoned in North Korea on account of their faith, the report said.
“North Korea remains a brutally hostile place for Christians to live,” the Open Doors International Christian Aid organization confirmed in a separate website statement.
“If discovered by the authorities, believers are either sent to labor camps as political prisoners where the conditions are atrocious, or killed on the spot – and their families will share their fate as well. Christians have absolutely no freedom. It is almost impossible for believers to gather or meet to worship. Those who dare to meet must do so in utmost secrecy – and at enormous risk.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement last year: “The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion [in the DPRK] also continues to be denied, with no alternative belief systems tolerated by the authorities,” Yahoo News reports.
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