By 
GHRD Research Team
by Salma Smida, retrieved from Pexels, 17 September 2018
After sealing off its borders in 2020, North Korea briefly opened to international tourism again during the past months. Ad hoc promotional campaigns and the International Marathon attracted a lot of tourists to the country, at the expense of systematic abuses and human rights violations of North Korean citizens.
After organising an International Marathon in 2024, North Korea opened its borders to international tourists for a few months at the beginning of 2025. Although travelling into the country has been banned again already, tourists from all over the world were able to cross the country’s border, a permission that had only been granted to Russian citizens before.
According to one of the managers of Koryo Tours, a North Korean state-owned tour company organising trips to North Korea, foreigners visiting the country are allowed to visit a school uniform factory and a sea cucumber farm in the Rason region. Tourists are also taken to see statues of the Kim leaders and events like mass dances.
Notably, the North Korean tour guides are also tasked with keeping tourists away from the brutal realities of the country. In fact, tour guides only allow tourists to visit specific areas of the country that were prepared for the occasion by imposing strict restrictions, violating the human rights of North Korean citizens. According to the tour guides’ instructions, Westerners are only allowed to visit if accompanied by a guide. No foreigner is allowed to wander alone.
It is worth noticing that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has invested a lot of money over the years to build tourism facilities in several strategic areas of the Rason region. This region is close to the Russia-China-North Korea border, permitting easy transportation from China and Russia.
Many tourist attractions built in the Rason region were completed thanks to the forced labour of the North Korean people living in the region. Furthermore, the region has witnessed a peak in torture, public executions, forced disappearances, and arbitrary arrest against those people who refused to be subjected to forced labour to build tourist attractions (The Interpreter, 2025).
Reports have also underlined how even though tourists cannot move or speak freely in North Korea, their presence is still a chance to subtly challenge the regime’s propaganda. Since the Korean War in the 1950s, posters, books, TV and films in the country have portrayed Westerners as villains trying to damage North Korea.
The general manager of Koryo Tours, Simon Cockerell, added that tourism was a way for locals, many of whom would risk being shot or imprisoned if they tried to escape North Korea “to get a little taste of what foreigners are like, to experience interactions and stories and songs and anecdotes and gossip with foreigners as much as possible.” (The World, 2025).
Sources and Further Readings
Vu, K. (2025, March 20) The North Korea tourist trap. The Interpreter.
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