DENIAL OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM FROM BIRTH Under international law, every person possesses the right to adopt, change, and renounce a religion or belief; the right to manifest a religion or belief; the right to worship and to establish places of worship; the right to display religious symbols; and the right to teach religion or belief and to disseminate religious materials, including missionary activity. Further, parents and guardians possess the right to ensure the religious and moral education of their children, while children possess the right to learn of religions or beliefs in an unbiased and objective way. Each of these rights protects the individual, and not religion or belief itself. Consequently, the North Korean government retains only the narrowest legal means to limit the freedom to manifest a religion or belief and only when the government can prove that such restrictions are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. At its most essential level, North Koreans experience the denial of the right to religious freedom from birth. In an interview, Hong Na Yong explained that in childhood, “[School] lessons feature missionaries, and there are also movies about the missionaries. There is actually a movie titled The Missionary. The movie features an American missionary who came to Korea during the Japanese colonial occupation period and swindled children after pretending to care about them. After people watched the movie, they developed a negative impression of the missionaries on an intuitive level. People even use the word ‘missionary’ as a curse word.” Another interviewee, Lee Yong, recalled, “there was a separate subject that completely demonized the missionaries. The very purpose of that subject was to stress how horrible the missionaries are and how horrible religion and the practice of superstition is.” In turn, Won Du Jae explained, “We do not know who Jesus is, but we are educated to be afraid of the cross. They teach us in school that [crosses] are for hanging people or bleeding people to death.” Exhibition halls, which are present in every province, serve as permanent institutions where ‘anti-socialist behaviors,’ including religious acts, are denounced and portrayed as evil. Yang Keum Jun recalled how Sinchon Museum in South Hwanghae Province featured a “missionary who tattooed the word thief onto a child’s forehead with acid because the child picked and ate a rotten apple […] I used to think about how scary the missionaries and practitioners are rather than how an actual church functioned when I was living in North Korea. We would think of [religious people] as villains and murderers.” On state-run television, children and adults are further exposed to anti-religious materials. Keum Jin Soo told investigators, “There is something called the Class Education Material Recordings. These are television programs, each about 30 to 40 minutes long, and they feature the arrest of enemy spies who had infiltrated into the interior of North Korean society and engaged in anti-socialist sabotage. These [materials] display Bibles they had confiscated from house searches conducted on spies. There was an actual Bible, with the words ‘complete edition of the Bible’ written on the cover. I used to think of the Bible as a fortune telling device.” Christianity is, in most documented cases, directly associated with the United States. Shin Nam Ki told investigators, “I used to think that almost all missionaries were Americans when I was little. As I grew up, however, I started to know better. Aside from the curriculum contents, this perspective was encouraged through graphic novels rather than movies. There were graphic novels featuring contents such as Christian missionaries coaxing children into a church and drawing their blood in the basements. These comic books were published by the government.” The absolute denial of the right to religious freedom extends from childhood into adulthood. For example, the Women’s Union is just one of the nationwide organizations through which the Workers’ Party of Korea exercises control over the ideological alignment of non-party members. All North Korean women between the ages of 31 and 60 who do not hold Workers’ Party of Korea membership, and who are housewives or are not employed at a state-assigned workplace, are required to be members of the Women’s Union. The Women’s Union is structured in such a way that every local committee is subordinate to a higher committee, which consolidates the work of several committees and ultimately reports to a section of the Central Committee in Pyongyang. As with the case of the Ministry of People’s Security and the Ministry of State Security, the Women’s Union’s coverage Organized Persecution: Documenting Religious Freedom Violations in North Korea 15