1046 774 FEDERAL REPORTER, 3d SERIES a previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.’’ Id. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or ‘‘North Korea’’), long a mainstay on the State Department’s list of terror sponsors—in fact, one of a small handful of bad actors that spurred Congress to adopt the terrorism exception in the first place, see H.R.Rep. No. 104–383, at 62 (1995)—has never shied away from torturing and killing its political enemies. See generally U.N. Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/25/CRP.1 (Feb. 7, 2014). That much is clear. Equally clear, the Reverend Dong Shik Kim, the alleged victim in this case, spent nearly a decade providing humanitarian and religious services to North Korean defectors and refugees who fled to China seeking asylum. And there is no question that North Korean operatives abducted Reverend Kim in 2000 after the government found out about his activities. In fact, a South Korean court convicted a DPRK agent for that very kidnapping. See Han Kim v. Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 950 F.Supp.2d 29, 35 (D.D.C.2013) (citing Decl. of J.D. Kim). Beyond that, though, we have no direct evidence of the Reverend’s fate. After his family, invoking the terrorism exception, sued the North Korean government, they presented numerous witnesses, including several experts on the regime’s brutal tactics, who claim to have heard second- or third-hand that the Reverend died as a result of torture soon after he disappeared. But no one—not the Kims, not the witnesses who submitted declarations on their behalf, and not the district court—knows for certain what happened. Still, when the DPRK failed to show up to answer the charges, the Kims asked the district court for a default judgment holding the regime liable for torturing and killing the Reverend. The FSIA provides that ‘‘[n]o judgment by default shall be entered TTT unless the claimant establishes his claim or right to relief by evidence satisfactory to the court.’’ 28 U.S.C. § 1608(e). Precisely what that standard entails—that is, how much and what kind of evidence the default provision requires—is unclear. That question is especially vexing where, as here, the defendant State prevents any evidence from leaving its borders. Recognizing as much, the district court observed that since North Korea ‘‘has not participated in the proceedings,’’ since ‘‘there has been no opportunity for discovery,’’ and since the ‘‘widely feared TTT repression’’ in the country ‘‘obscures the precise details of Reverend Kim’s treatment,’’ the plaintiffs ‘‘cannot be expected to meet a typical standard for judgment as a matter of law.’’ Kim, 950 F.Supp.2d at 35, 42. Nonetheless, the district court concluded that the ‘‘evidence must be rigorous enough to support the facts necessary for jurisdiction.’’ Id. Relying on Price v. Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, 294 F.3d 82 (D.C.Cir.2002), in which this Court rejected an FSIA plaintiff’s allegations because he had not recounted the precise nature of his mistreatment, the district court determined that the Kims had failed to carry their evidentiary burden. Specifically, it observed that their witnesses could ‘‘not establish the severity of the treatment of Reverend Kim in particular, or that his treatment amounts to torture under the rigorous definition of that term adopted in the FSIA,’’ and instead engaged only in ‘‘discussion about the abuses generally in [North Korean forced-labor] camps to show that’’ the DPRK ‘‘probably’’ mis-