As of 2026. The classification system remains in force in 2026; no count of those adversely classified or relocated has ever been published, so there is no headline figure to date.
From the late 1950s the North Korean state sorted its population by inherited political background into a 'core', 'wavering' and 'hostile' class, subdivided into dozens of categories, on the basis of ancestors' status before and during the Korean War. Songbun governs where a person may live, what education and work they may have, and access to rations, and people classed as hostile were expelled from Pyongyang and from strategically sensitive border areas to remote mountainous counties, in some cases as whole families and villages. The system operates alongside a permit regime that makes internal travel dependent on state authorisation, so classification effectively fixes people in place. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea concluded in 2014 that the state maintains a system of discrimination based on songbun that determines almost every aspect of life, that this has been used to conduct forced relocations, and that crimes against humanity have been committed pursuant to state policies. North Korea rejects the Commission's report in its entirety and denies that songbun exists as described; almost all evidence comes from defector testimony and smuggled documents, which the Commission cross-checked but which cannot be independently verified inside the country.
The North Korean state classified its whole population by inherited political loyalty and used the classification to control where people may live and work
The DPRK's 2008 census counted 24,052,231 people and UN Population Division estimates put the population at about 26 million in the mid-2020s; at the classification's inception in 1957 the population was roughly 10-11 million. Defector testimony collated by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea describes three broad classes and 51 sub-categories covering the entire population, with the 'hostile' class put at about a quarter of it, but no official breakdown has ever been published.
No death toll can be attributed to the classification system itself as distinct from the political prison camps and from famine mortality, both of which the UN Commission of Inquiry found were distributed along songbun lines. Relocations to barren northern counties are reported by defectors to have caused deaths from hunger and exposure, but no figures exist.
The UN Commission of Inquiry documented discrimination amounting to denial of status, arbitrary detention, forced labour and the songbun-weighted distribution of food during famine.
North Korea