North Korea carries out public executions on riverbanks and at school grounds and marketplaces for charges such as stealing copper from factory machines, distributing media from South Korea and prostitution, a report issued Wednesday said.
The report, by a Seoul-based nongovernmental organization, said the often extrajudicial decisions for public executions are frequently influenced by "bad" family background or a government campaign to discourage certain behavior.
The Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG) said its report was based on interviews with 375 North Korean defectors from the isolated state over a period of two years.
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