Mapping Human Rights Abuses
The Transitional Justice Working Group’s 2019 report “Mapping the Fate of the
Dead: Killings and Burials in North Korea” is based on four years of research
(2015-2019) to document and map three types of locations connected to human rights
violations in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea):
1. State-sanctioned killing sites;
2. Sites where the dead are disposed of by the state;
3. Official locations which may contain documents or other evidence related to these events.
The project uses satellite imagery during interviews with North Korean escapees to geolocate
these sites and applies Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology throughout the
research process. Geographical mapping of sites connected to human rights abuses provides
important information about patterns of killing and burial that are often not visible in
individual interviewee testimonies.
Download the mapping datasets in .kml and .geojson format: https://drive.google.com/open?id=18Wvcuj_X3dXQdXZnc1a8U8tijsEIqrea
These datasets are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
For a visual overview of the report’s key findings, download the infographic below.
Download the 2017 Report
English: Press Release
Korean: 북한 반인도범죄 매핑 (TJWG)