Three women were subjected to a struggle session and public trial for involvement in illegal housing sales late last month in Pyongyang, Daily NK has learned.
A source in Pyongyang told Daily NK recently that three women living in Pyongyang’s Rangrang district underwent a public struggle session and trial for illegally reselling new homes at a premium less than a year after they were first occupied.
According to the source, the public struggle session and trial—jointly led by Pyongyang city’s government and the Rangrang district police—took place in an empty lot in Rangrang district on Dec. 21. Officials from Pyongyang city government, Rangrang district’s party committee and district government, and the neighborhood office, as well as neighborhood watch unit heads and members of the district’s Socialist Women’s Union of Korea branch, took part en masse in the struggle session and trial, which lasted three hours.
The women busted for illegal house sales lived in Rangrang district’s Chongbaek 1 and Tosong 2 neighborhoods and were accused of engaging in underground housing sales for years.
“The city and district police sternly dealt with the incident not as a simple economic matter but as a warning-type public trial to serve as an example at year’s end,” the source said. “In fact, the identity and crimes of the women were exposed in detail during the struggle session and public trial.”
Forged permits and state-allotted homes
Their crimes, as mentioned during the struggle session and public trial, included forging official housing use permits issued in the name of a state agency—in this case, the people’s committee—distributing and selling forged licenses, and affixing forged official seals to the forged permits to make it appear that proper residency qualifications and procedures had been met.
The official who led the struggle session and public trial accused them of using forged permits to resell—for a premium—homes the state had allotted people in June 2025, usually within six months of their occupants first receiving them, revealing in detail the roles each played in the sales.
According to the proceedings, one woman oversaw production of forged permits and official seals, while another woman made the deals using them. The last one was a go-between who encouraged homeowners to break residency rules and sell their houses at a premium.
“The state was angered more because individuals had tread upon the sensitive sector of housing allotment and residency than at their forging of residency permits,” the source said. “The authorities strongly pointed out that this differed little from capitalist home sales, in which individuals buy and sell properties, and branded what the women did as anti-socialist behavior.”
During the struggle session and public trial, officials bellowed that the state “invests a great deal of effort into allotting even a single home, and that upending this with a single piece of paper was tantamount to destroying the order set by the state for money.”
Ultimately, the three women were given six, five, and three years of reeducation-through-labor.
The chief of the Rangrang district police, which took part in the struggle session and trial, got up at the end and declared that “housing documents and public seals were expressions of the state system and authority, and that [police] would root out wrongdoers so that nobody harmed such expressions for money again.”
He also warned that, from 2026, police would expand the scope of what constituted the forging of housing permits and public seals, and that cases would be dealt with publicly as soon as they were detected, with severe punishments levied.
Official complicity goes unpunished
However, people who participated in the struggle session and trial said that while the women led and conducted the sales, “it was an exaggeration to say they forged the documents on their own.”
“Naturally, individuals deal homes, be they new or old, but ultimately, to make a sale, you need the cooperation of officials in the relevant department of the people’s committee,” the source said. “When this latest case became a big deal, people criticized that the people’s committee officials with power escaped while only the women were punished.”
January 20, 2026 at 10:52PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)