Hyesan

August twenty twenty-four.

In the border city of Hyesan, three women are selling contraceptives in the market.

Inspectors take their stalls.

Each one is fined three hundred thousand won, which is ten months of official wages, and banned from that marketplace for the rest of her life.

An abortion performed quietly by a doctor in his own house costs more, around a dollar seventy-five, worth roughly ten pounds of rice, and to the won, the average North Korean worker's monthly wage.

So the state criminalized both of them and went after the supply.

The same month as those fines in Hyesan.

A conference room inside a university hospital is being used as a courtroom.

In August 2013, Ji Seong-ho testified at the United Nations Commission of Inquiry's public hearing in Seoul.

He said he grew up in Hyesan in Ryanggang province near the Chinese border and lived in North Korea until leaving in 2006.

His testimony described the famine years when his family faced hunger and he searched for coal that could be exchanged for food.

He described being severely injured by a train during that period.

Factories slowed or stopped.

The UN inquiry, humanitarian assessments, demographic research and structured refugee surveys all support the wider pattern.

Ji Seong-ho's Hyesan testimony belongs to this evidence window.

His family's experience does not prove that every household endured the same conditions.