Do we like them?

Do we like Kim Yo Jong?

Our score: 1 out of 10. A long run of hostile statements and a sanctioned role running state propaganda, with no verified good to set against it.

Kim Yo Jong is the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the daughter of the late Kim Jong Il. Details of her early life are thin, because Pyongyang has never disclosed much about the family. She stepped onto the world stage in 2018 as an envoy to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Since then she has become the regime's attack dog in print. In June 2020 a statement under her name called defectors who sent leaflets over the border “human scum”, and the North blew up the joint liaison office days later. She had warned of a “tragic scene” before it happened. That's a pattern of threatening first and following through.

On the harm test, the US Treasury sanctioned her in January 2017 over what it described as “ongoing and serious human rights abuses and censorship activities”. The listing was reportedly tied to her role overseeing state propaganda and censorship. That's her own job, not the company she keeps. We found nothing on her stance on LGBTQ+ people, and North Korea gives them no legal recognition.

Her 2026 has been a promotion and a hard line. In February the ruling party made her a department director in its Central Committee, which one analyst called a promotion to ministerial rank. In June she called the nuclear programme “absolutely non-negotiable” and called a White House fact sheet on denuclearisation false.

Then came the aid row. South Korea planned to send 1,431 medical items to a Pyongyang hospital with a UN sanctions exemption. She called it “a noisy and ugly act” and said the North had nothing to exchange with Seoul. She also dismissed Seoul's finding that North Korean mines wounded three of its soldiers on 21 September.

The good stuff is thin. State media showed her delivering medicine in 2022, but that's a state image, not an independent record, so we don't count it. She did carry a letter from her brother to the South Korean president in 2018, and some people saw that as a thaw. In the years since, her statements have mostly slammed the door on engagement.