Overview
- Global Rights Compliance, in a report published Wednesday, shares interviews with 21 North Korean construction workers in three Russian cities that document clear forced-labor indicators.
- Workers described shifts as long as 14 to 16 hours for up to 364 days a year and said state quotas and deductions left some with about $10 a month, creating debt bondage when shortfalls rolled over.
- Testimony detailed passports taken on arrival, constant surveillance with informants, restricted calls and internet use, and cramped, unheated shipping containers with cockroaches, bedbugs, and only one or two showers a year.
- The group estimates North Korea’s overseas labor program sends more than 100,000 citizens to about 40 countries and raises roughly $500 million a year, while Russia’s labor shortage since the Ukraine war has increased demand and raised concerns the cash helps Pyongyang’s military ambitions.
- The practice breaches U.N. sanctions that bar hiring North Korean workers, and a separate South Korean NGO report says Russian entities routed tens of millions of dollars as “scholarships” through a university to skirt the rules, with wages ultimately seized by DPRK agencies tied to weapons programs.