Jean Mackenzie

In 2025 Jean Mackenzie sat down with South Korea’s recently elected President, Lee Jae Myung, for his first broadcast interview since taking office. 

They spoke about North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Pyongyang’s ties with China and Russia, and South Korea’s uncertain relationship with the US under President Trump, following a recent ICE raid at a South Korean factory.

President Lee told the BBC he would accept a deal between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in which North Korea agreed to freeze production of its nuclear weapons, rather than get rid of them.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dragged on, Vladimir Putin increasingly turned to North Korea for help. First Kim Jong Un sent weapons, then soldiers, and then construction workers.

Jean Mackenzie exposed how thousands of North Koreans were sent to Russia to work in slave-like conditions, to fill a huge labour shortage exacerbated by the war. She met six men who managed to escape.

Read Jean’s full investigation here

In South Korea feminism has become a dirty word. Women who advocate for equality are accused of being man-haters, worthy of punishment. 

For Radio 4’s Crossing Continents podcast, Jean Mackenzie uncovers how young men are targeting suspected feminists - bombarding them with abuse and demanding they be fired from their jobs, sometimes successfully.

She hears how these witch hunts have silenced women, and asks what this means for women's rights in a country where gender discrimination is still deeply entrenched.

Listen to the podcast HERE

Two years into the war, Ukraine was running out of men to fight. With Russia gaining ground, its army was struggling to find willing recruits. Conscription officers were known to be dragging men off public transport and forcing them to enlist - pushing many into hiding.

Jean Mackenzie traveled to Odesa to meet the men avoiding the draft, and to confront one conscription squad with a fearsome reputation. 

Read Jean's full story here

Jean Mackenzie secured unprecedented access to a tiny village deep in the heart of Korea’s Demilitarised Zone – the strip of no-man’s land separating North and South Korea. 

The community of elderly South Koreans live mere metres from North Korea, meaning they must be guarded day and night by hundreds of soldiers. With tensions rising, the village's days look numbered.

Read Jean's article here

In 2023, one family pulled off a seemingly impossible escape from North Korea. Kim Jong Un had sealed the borders because of the pandemic and defections had virtually ceased. But this family fled by boat in the dead of night.

Jean Mackenzie secured an exclusive interview with them - the first interview with anyone to have escaped since the borders shut. They revealed new details about life in North Korea, including cases of people starving to death and being executed.

Read the family’s full testimony here

For more than three years, North Korea sealed its borders. The world's most secretive and tyrannical state became an information black hole.

For months, three people inside North Korea risked their lives to tell the BBC what was happening.

They revealed, for the first time, the devastating tragedy that unfolded in this time: starvation, brutal crackdowns, and no chance to escape.

Watch Jean Mackenzie’s BBC 2 documentary North Korea: The Insiders.

You can read their testimonies here

To escape from North Korea has always been a dangerous and difficult feat. But at the outset of the pandemic, Kim Jong Un sealed the country’s borders, making it impossible to leave.

Songmi Park is one of the last known people to make it out.

She was on a quest to find her mother, who had left her behind as a child. The pair spoke exclusively to Jean Mackenzie about how they managed to reunite after 14 years apart.

You can read their remarkable story here.

South Korea’s rapid transformation into one of the richest countries in the world has left women trailing. They are paid on average a third less than men, and sexism and misogyny run deep. Upon entering office, its President promised to scrap the country’s Gender Equality Ministry, which supports women and victims of sexual assault. Jean Mackenzie met the women fighting to save it.

You can read Jean’s article here.

On Halloween tragedy struck the streets of Seoul. More than 150 young people were crushed to death, when a narrow alleyway became so tightly packed they couldn't breathe.

In the aftermath it became clear the crush could have been prevented if authorities had been better prepared and had responded faster.

Jean Mackenzie was in Itaewon that night. She later met with families of those who were killed as their anger mounted.

Read her article here

Hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea live in tiny underground apartments, made famous by the Oscar-winning film Parasite. Seoul wants to get rid of the flats, known as banjiha, after four people drowned inside them during severe flooding.

Jean Mackenzie goes to meet those who live in them and who own them. She discovers Korea’s rising inequality is forcing more people underground and into harm’s way.

In every corner of the UK, women are being kept as slaves and sold for sex. Many are trafficked into the country from Romania. With police struggling to stop this brutal business, Jean Mackenzie heads on a journey into Romania's underworld to expose how it all begins.

It's a world where traffickers have learnt to game the system; where, when children vanish, their disappearances are ignored. As Jean meets the girls being bought and sold, she uncovers the shocking secrets of this ruthless trade. Have the traffickers created an unstoppable crime?

Lebanon is in the grips of one of the world’s worst economic crises in more than a century. Food, fuel and medicine are all now scarce. As the country collapses, Jean Mackenzie finds that some families are moving into refugee camps in order to survive.

Roma communities are some of the most marginalised in Europe. They often live in overcrowded, segregated settlements and face wide-spread discrimination. The pandemic has cut them off from society even further, leaving some people struggling to survive. Jean Mackenzie was invited into one of Bulgaria’s largest Roma settlements, where she witnessed the devastating impact of Covid-19.

Huge protests have broken out in Poland as the government attempts to ban nearly all abortions. The Catholic country already has strict rules on abortion but the new law would stop even women whose babies were likely to die after birth from having terminations. Jean Mackenzie spent a night on the street with the protesters as they were beaten and pepper-sprayed, and finds that some hospitals are already refusing women the procedure.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya was bringing up her two young children with no political ambitions. Now she is running to be President of Belarus, taking on Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country for more than a quarter of a century. With her husband jailed by the regime, she is fighting for his and her country’s freedom. Can this unlikely politician unseat the man often referred to as Europe’s last dictator? The BBC’s Jean Mackenzie reports from inside Belarus in the run up to the election.

Jean Mackenzie investigates the working conditions of domestic workers in Spain and finds that some have been kept locked inside their employers homes during the entire pandemic. She uncovers harrowing stories of exploitation and abuse. Most of Spain’s domestic workers live in their employers’ homes and they do not have the same legal rights as other workers.

Jean Mackenzie investigates abortions during the coronavirus pandemic and finds that countries across Europe are denying women the procedure. In some countries hospitals have stopped performing terminations, while in others, where abortion is restricted, women have been left unable to travel for treatment elsewhere. She speaks to women who have resorted to backstreet abortions and others forced to continue with unwanted pregnancies.

In the midst of Italy’s coronavirus crisis, Jean Mackenzie encounters a tiny village that has been mysteriously quarantined and turned into a human laboratory. Sealed off by the army, medical researchers run tests on the entire population, in an attempt to learn more about the virus. Could this sleepy hilltop town help us solve some of the mysteries surrounding coronavirus?

Thousands of refugees and migrants are trapped in Bosnia without a bed, at risk of freezing to death. Aid agencies say a humanitarian disaster is looming.  With Bosnia now a major route into the EU, its official refugee camps are full, but the government has failed to allocate new centres. The BBC’s Jean Mackenzie has been given exclusive access to an unofficial camp described as ‘unfit for humans’.

The war between Kosovo and Serbia ended 20 years ago, but the conflict has never been properly resolved. In parts of Kosovo, people from either side of the conflict still don't mix. Can the generation born after the war ever find a way to live together? 20-year-old Arian has never even spoken to a Serb. After some hesitation, he has agreed to meet 16-year-old Selena on the bridge that separates his community from hers.

A wave of far-right politics is sweeping Europe, with parties promising to smash the ruling elite and end migration. With European elections looming, the BBC’s Jean Mackenzie travels across the continent to find out why the right is on the rise. She meets those celebrating its success, and those fighting to stop it. Could Europe, as we know it, be about to change?

Far-Right Populism is spreading across Europe, from Germany and Italy to Estonia. But are these parties fuelling hate? In the last of her three-part series, Jean Mackenzie travels to Hungary, the country many far-right parties look up to. Led by the ardent-nationalist Viktor Orban for nearly a decade, this is populism in practice.

Restrictive abortion laws in Northern Ireland mean women cannot have an abortion, even under extreme circumstances. Now some Conservative MPs are now calling for the UK government to step in change this. Jean Mackenzie has been to Belfast, where the fight to legalise abortion is intensifying. She meets Denise, who had to continue with her pregnancy, knowing her daughter wouldn’t survive birth.

In this investigation for the Victoria Derbyshire Programme, Jean Mackenzie finds that women are breaking the law, by taking the abortion pill at home, because they cannot get to a clinic. In England, women must take the pill at a hospital or clinic, before travelling home for the abortion process to begin, but the effects can start within 30 minutes. She hears from women who have passed their pregnancy in public on their way home. In the weeks following this report, the government changed to the law to allow the pill to be taken at home.

With Hollywood shaken by revelations of sexual assault, Jean Mackenzie investigates the dark side of the UK music industry. She learns that abuse and harassment is “endemic" in the business, with "dangerous men" at the top abusing their power. Here, four women speak out about their abuse and harassment for the first time, including "Amy", who says she was groomed by her music manager when she was 15.

Anti-abortion campaigners are accused of harassing women as they visit abortion clinics across the UK. Years on some women say they are still haunted by the abuse they received. With one London council trying to ban the protests, Jean Mackenzie has been to meet both the women who've been targeted and those who stand at the gates.

Essure is a medical device, used by the NHS, which allows women to be sterilised without needing surgery. After being contacted by people claiming the device had ruined their lives, we decided to investigate further. We learn it has led to serious complications and side-effects, leaving some women needing to have their wombs removed. After this report, the Essure device stopped being used in the UK.

Being injured during childbirth is still a taboo subject, yet one that affects many women. It can leave women traumatised and with long-lasting disabilities. But often women don’t share their experiences, because they find their symptoms embarrassing or they don’t understand what is supposed to happen after birth. Here, Jean Mackenzie speaks to women to try and break down this taboo, and hears from doctors and midwives trying to reduce the number of injuries.

Sharia Councils are used in the UK to settle disputes in Islamic communities. They’re often used to grant couples a religious divorce. They’re under review by the government, after being criticised for discriminating against women. The BBC’s Jean Mackenzie has gained rare access to a council in Birmingham, where she spent a month following proceedings.