In its 2001 report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee

In its 2001 report to the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) the government of North Korea claimed that it had reduced the number of criminal offences carrying the death penalty from 33 to 5. However, the HRC 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.
On March 1, 2006, North Korea issued a special decree calling for the maximum penalty of death for its citizens involved in manufacturing and trafficking drugs.
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 who listened to foreign radio broadcasts and those 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.
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 2005 is indeterminate, but definitely runs into the many tens.
On February 11, 2005, North Korea executed about 70 refugees who were captured in China and sent home, the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees said citing informants in China. The group said about eight or nine of the 70 executed sometime in January were put to death in public to discourage others from trying to slip across the border into China. At least 5 people were executed between February and March for attempting to escape the country.