The United Nations Commission of Inquiry and other outside monitors document the North Korean state's treatment of Christians in detail, arrests, detentions, camp imprisonment and collective punishment of family members, but the country's total closure to independent verification means no monitor has ever published a defensible aggregate count of deaths tied specifically to religious persecution, as distinct from the wider political prison camp population.
What would resolve this Independent access to North Korea's prison camp system, or a systematic accounting by a body with reliable access to defector testimony, that separates deaths attributable to religious persecution from the general political prisoner population, comparable to the disaggregated reporting already possible for detention and camp population estimates.
OpenHuman rights documentation, North Korean studies.United Nations Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea