Source: Yahoo! News
Wire Service: Reuters
On March 24, 2005 Reuters reported, "North Korea represses religion and has an official ideology that is a form of secular humanism, a U.S. government agency said on Thursday. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said interviews with North Korean refugees showed a pattern of arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution for public expressions of religion. 'Any reappearance of Christianity, possibly permeating from northern China to where many thousands of North Koreans fled from famine in the 1990s, is rigorously repressed,' USCIRF North Korean researcher David Hawk told a news conference. Only two active churches, with one more to be built, and one Buddhist temple were known to exist -- all in the capital, Pyongyang, and apparently serving the foreign diplomatic and business community there."