Just a few dozen North Korean defectors reached South Korea in 2022, the unification ministry announced Tuesday, as severe COVID-19 movement restrictions in the DPRK and China continued to make it difficult for people to escape.

The 67 defectors that arrived in the ROK last year marks the second-lowest total on record and is only slightly higher than the 63 defectors that made it to South Korea in 2021, the ministry said in a statement to reporters. 

Throughout the 2010s, over a thousand defectors made it to South Korea every year — often by escaping over the DPRK-China border and