The New Jersey Institute of Continuing Legal Education offered a rare window into North Korea’s repressive legal system as told by a former soldier who escaped the reclusive nation.
An expert panel of human rights advocates, professors and immigration attorneys convened on June 18 for a special seminar that addressed the human rights crisis in North Korea and how legal professionals can advocate for the rights of North Korean refugees.
The program featured speaker Hyun-Seung Lee, who escaped North Korea in 2014 at age 29. He grew up a member of the North Korean elite, attending prestigious schools in the region and serving three years in the nation’s miliary. In the most difficult decision of his life, he and his family fled to China after witnessing friends arrested and disappeared because of their alleged connections to Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong Un’s uncle, who he executed in 2013.
“North Korea has laws on paper, but in reality it’s a country where the law does not exist in any meaningful sense. It’s a bizarre system maintained not by justice or law but by the whims of a dictator,” Lee said. “These events forced me to ask fundamental questions – why would a country that claims to be people-centered send innocent families to prison camps?”
Life in North Korea is governed by one unspoken rule – that the law is merely a tool to implement the will of the supreme leader and the party, Lee said. Before arriving in the United States, he had no idea that being a lawyer was a potential career.
“While I had heard of prosecutors and courts, everyone understood that verdicts were determined by the leader’s will, not by evidence or argument. Even in the military, the idea of someone defending the soldiers’ legal rights was completely unimaginable,” Lee said.
Several major human rights organizations and international bodies consider North Korea among the most oppressive regimes in the world. In a sprawling 2024 report, the United Nations called North Korea a state without parallel in the contemporary world, finding evidence of crimes against humanity committed in its political prison camps. Freedom House, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting democracy around the world, gives North Korea the lowest possible freedom score for its complete absence of civil liberties among its people.
Lee said he regularly witnessed punishment without law or due process. Among the injustices – a classmate’s family forced out of Pyongyang for watching a foreign film, 200 university students arrested, beaten and sent to work and reeducation camps for sharing media and a young girl forced to work in mines for seven years because of her father’s corruption.
“None received trials. None had legal representation. No one explained what laws they had broken. Their lives ended the moment they were deemed dangerous to the regime,” Lee said. “They don’t know what freedom, democracy or the law is. And when people don’t know their rights, they cannot demand them.”
Lee stressed that despite the widespread suffering of its citizens, North Korean society is not without meaning. People respect the structure and order of daily life, show courtesy to others and care deeply about the collective well-being over individualism.
“The real problem is that these ethical foundations aren’t supported by a legal system,” Lee said. “If North Koreans could learn what democracy or the rule of law truly are, I believe the country could begin its transition toward prosperity and even peaceful unification.”
Lee has spoken widely about human rights in North Korea following his defection. With his sister, he runs the Pyonghattan YouTube channel about the realities of life in North Korea. As a fellow at the Global Peace Foundation, Lee represents a cohort of North Korean escapees to raise awareness about the nation’s civil rights abuses and promote change.
View NJICLE's upcoming live seminars and library of on-demand programs here.