You’re mixing up a lot of different concepts.
“NK is not a free country” is a meaningless sentence. What does a free country look like? Is it a country where people may achieve their highest level ambitions regardless of who they’re born to, their identity, or any immutable characteristic? Because it isn’t that, and that doesn’t exist anywhere. Is it a country where the state ?mostly stays out of people’s lives and people are generally free to do what they wanna do as long as they aren’t destabilizing things? I believe it actually is, and I know you don’t think any serious person could think that way, but I’d invite you to show me a source that offers compelling evidence that the above is not the case and isn’t from the US State Department or Radio Free Asia.
Nobody in NK is being killed or prosecuted just for their beliefs. They don’t have mind readers. I also guarantee they aren’t throwing people in jail for saying bad things to each other. Think about how ridiculous this would be to enforce, if you could claim someone you don’t like told you, in private, that they disliked the government you could get them arrested. That’s absurd.
They don’t have free speech, though, because they’re… currently still officially at war and effectively under siege by the most militarized country on earth, and its vassal state that’s armed to the teeth. If you lived in NK, would you feel comfortable with lax free speech laws and all the other “freedoms” that would allow for the enemy to more effectively destabilize and fracture the country? Because that’s been a standard imperialist tactic since the coup against Arbenz in Guatemala about a century ago.
Moreover, if I had to draw an easy conclusion from this: you’re probably a westerner, and you might even be from the US or another country that supported the imperialist and genocidal invasion of Korea. If you can understand why it would be really stupid for an Israeli, or even an Israeli leftist, to tell Palestinians what they are and aren’t allowed to do to resist Israeli aggression, what’s so hard to understand about the idea westerners whose governments are still laying siege to the DPRK being the last people who should be criticizing it? Do you think the North Korean people are just mindless drones waiting for their western saviors, who need the western left to pressure their governments to sanction and blockade the DPRK even more, to free them from the “Kim dynasty”?
If you don’t want to take me at my word, I can provide one (dumb) piece of evidence, then you can try to find some evidence to the contrary. Here’s a video where some Aussies go get a haircut in NK where they echo a lot of what I’m saying: people are just living their lives, they never interact with the government during their stay. If you have a source that says something different and isn’t from an enemy of NK then I’ll check it out.
I don’t think “government criticism should be placed where due - even if that’s everywhere” is a very useful outlook for the world. I think we should first try to understand why countries are the way they are, and give our criticisms to the system that made them that way when appropriate. Again, think about the example of Palestine. Do Palestinian groups do things I disagree with? Absolutely. Is the way to tackle that situation to criticize them? No, because they’re already facing a war of genocidal extermination, so if you want them to do better, you should first try to remove the aggravating factors that are impeding democratic forces within their camp from winning over the reactionaries. It’s the exact same situation with NK: you don’t think their government is sufficiently transparent, it’s overly punitive, not democratic enough, etc etc? They won’t change those things as long as they’re under a genocidal blockade and the whole world wants them dead.