North Korea released the full text of its revised basic law on Wednesday, and the document at the center of the news is the North Korea revised constitution. Posted in public for the first time in years, the text treats South Korea as a separate country, removes the old language of reunification, and expands the nuclear authority of leader Kim Jong-un.
The full Korean text appeared on Naenara, a state propaganda website run by Pyongyang.
A note posted with the document said the constitution had been amended and supplemented on March 23, at the first session of the 15th Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s legislature.
The release itself was part of the story. North Korea had made its constitution inaccessible about two years and eight months earlier, after Kim declared a new doctrine for relations with the South.
That doctrine describes the two Koreas as two hostile states. Wednesday’s publication shows that the idea is no longer only a speech line or a party slogan. It now sits inside the country’s highest legal text, where it is much harder to reverse.
How the North Korea revised constitution rewrites the map
The most closely watched change is a new territorial provision in Article 2.
The article defines North Korean territory as land bordering China and Russia to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south. It adds the territorial waters and airspace that rest on that land.
By naming the Republic of Korea in that way, the text places South Korea alongside China and Russia as a neighboring country that shares a border with the North.
The provision stops short of one important detail. It does not spell out the exact land boundary or the exact maritime boundary between the two states.
Provisions on national reunification that appeared in the previous constitution have been removed from the new text.
That deletion matters because reunification had long been written into the legal identity of both Korean states. Each side once described the other as part of one nation waiting to be joined again.
The revised document takes a different path. It defines the North as a state that sits next to the South, not as one half of a single country.
At the same time, the text does not go as far as some observers might have expected. It does not label South Korea as the number one hostile state, and it does not call the South an invariable principal enemy.
That gap leaves the legal wording hard in structure but slightly softer in tone. The separation is formal, yet the harshest possible labels were left out.
Why the North Korea revised constitution strengthens Kim Jong-un
The document also strengthens the personal authority of Kim Jong-un at the top of the state.
It gives the chairman of the State Affairs Commission, the post held by Kim, command over the country’s nuclear forces.
It also gives him the power to delegate authority to use nuclear weapons to the state nuclear command organization.
In plain terms, control of the nuclear arsenal is now written into the constitution itself, with Kim named at the top of that chain of command.
The changes match a path Kim set out in public steps. At a plenary meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party in late 2023, he described inter-Korean relations as those between two belligerent states rather than members of the same nation.
In January 2024, at a meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly, he ordered the removal of constitutional references to the northern half of Korea.
He also ordered the removal of the principles of independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity, ideas that had framed the old approach to the South.
North Korea then disabled the constitution section of the Naenara website in March 2024, which blocked outside access to the full text while the revision moved through the system.
Seen in that sequence, the North Korea revised constitution is the legal finish to a political turn that began almost three years ago. The speeches came first, the website went dark next, and the amended text has now been shown to the public.
The published North Korea revised constitution also looks familiar to specialists in Seoul. It largely matches the revised text that South Korea’s Ministry of Unification obtained and released in May.
Two passages, however, are missing or incomplete. Part of Article 121, which covers the Cabinet’s authority to adopt resolutions at plenary meetings, is omitted.
Part of Article 156, which explains how people’s assessors are elected to special courts, is also omitted. It is not yet clear whether those passages were deleted in the actual revision or simply left out of the public version.
For governments watching the peninsula, the North Korea revised constitution raises practical questions that the text does not answer. The biggest one is the border, since the document claims waters and airspace without fixing their precise limits.
What is clear is the direction. Pyongyang has now published the North Korea revised constitution, a basic law that treats the South as another state, drops reunification as a stated goal, and places nuclear command in Kim’s hands, and it has done so in its own words, on its own website, for anyone to read.
Source: Korea JoongAng Daily