A new State Department study on international religious freedom reveals North Korea had a 2-year-old and parents live in a political prison camp for life for merely having found a Bible in the parents' possession.
Describing many religious freedom abuses, the report said "One case involved the 2009 arrest of a family based on their religious practices and possession of a Bible. The entire family, including a two-year-old child, were given life sentences in political prison camps.
The report noted as many as 70,000 Christians have been imprisoned in North Korea.
"Christians experienced persecution that was 'violent and intense' and that 'life for Christians … is a constant cauldron of pressure; capture or death is only a mistake away,'" according to the report.
There were also reports of North Koreans being sentenced to death for being caught with a copy of the Bible in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
"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," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said last July, according to the report's executive summary.
North Korea has continued to "execute, torture, arrest and physically abuse people for their religious activities," the conclusions found.
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Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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