In its 2001 report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee

In its 2001 report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee, the North Korean government informed that it had revised its criminal law in 1987 and 1995, reducing the number of criminal charges that can lead to capital punishment from 33 to 5.
The Committee noted that 4 of the 5 offences were essentially political and “couched in terms so broad that the imposition of the death penalty may be subject to essentially subjective criteria, and not confined to the ‘most serious crimes’ only.”
The five capital offences are conspiracy against the state power, high treason, terrorism, anti-national treachery and international murder.
North Korea said its use of the death penalty was based on “special domestic circumstances and the need to prevent crimes”. People were reportedly condemned to death for such ‘crimes’ as “ideological divergence”, “opposing socialism”, and “counterrevolutionary crimes”. Political prisoners, peaceful opponents, deserters or repatriated defectors, those caught listening to foreign radio broadcasts or found in possession of so-called “reactionary” material, have been shot.
In late 2004, Officials at Seoul's spy agency, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), confirmed a news report saying North Korea had revised its criminal code on April 29, 2004. Under the new code, North Koreans found guilty of organizing insurgencies against the government would be sentenced either to death or to life in one of the country's notorious labour camps. Previously, the penalty was 10 years of hard labour or the death sentence.
Defectors, defined as those "who betray the fatherland and run away to other states," were previously jailed for up to 10 years. That ceiling had been lifted and they could be jailed for life or executed, though they must be sentenced to a minimum of five years under the new law.
In recent years, thousands of North Korean refugees arrested in China whilst attempting to reach South Korea and Japan by boat, were forcibly repatriated to North Korea. Defectors said that refugees who are sent home to North Korea face detention in labour camps for 'anti-state' criminal acts, and even the death penalty.
Moreover, close to 200,000 political prisoners worked in conditions of slave labour and near-starvation in dozens of secret prison camps in the country, according to "The Hidden Gulag - Exposing North Korea's Prison Camps", a report published in October 2003 by the independent US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
Starving people have been shot or sent to labour camps for stealing food. The famine that hit North Korea in 1995 worsened to the extent that, according to a report issued by the North Korean Refugees Relief Fund Conference, a Chinese group established in 1998, flesh from fresh corpses or kidnapped and murdered children was available in the black market.
Chinese and Japanese newspapers, that carried stories of the report on June 3, 2003, said the North Korean government, to discourage the practice, was publicly executing persons convicted of trading in human flesh.
North Korea continues to persecute Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists and members of clandestine Christian churches. Christians are imprisoned, beaten, tortured and killed for reading the Bible or preaching about God, and particularly for having ties with evangelical groups operating across the border in China.
On April 16, 2003 the United Nations Human Rights Commission issued its first ever condemnation of North Korea, expressing "deep concern" at "systematic" rights abuses in the reclusive Communist state. The UNCHR voted in favour of a resolution brought by the European Union and the United States that accused Pyongyang of "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (and) public executions" as well as "all-pervasive and severe restrictions on the freedoms of thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression".
Though public executions have declined in latter years due to strong criticism by the international community, executions continue to take place with the same frequency as before, but are now confined to prisons or camps run by the security services.
The number of executions carried out in North Korea in 2004 is indeterminate.