How North Korea is governed: one party written into the constitution

What the constitution says the state is

Article 1 calls the Democratic People's Republic of Korea "an independent socialist State representing the interests of all the Korean people". Article 3 names its guiding ideas as juche and songun, self-reliance and military first. Article 4 places sovereignty in the workers, peasants, soldiers and working intellectuals, exercised through the Supreme People's Assembly and the local people's assemblies, and Article 5 makes every state organ work on the principle of democratic centralism. Article 12 commits the state to "the dictatorship of the people's democracy".

The text has been replaced once and revised often. Britannica records a first constitution in 1948, a new one in 1972, and revisions in 1992, 1998, 2009 and 2016. The 1998 revision added a preamble calling the document a "Kim Il-Sung constitution" and named the founder, who had died in 1994, eternal president. The 2009 revision dropped the references to communism, which the Workers' Party reasserted in 2021. The 2016 revision created the State Affairs Commission in place of the National Defence Commission. The English text published by the Constitute Project is that 2016 version, and the amendments since are not in it. In October 2024 state media confirmed an amendment defining South Korea as a "hostile state", and a further revision, which Reuters reported on 6 May 2026 as believed to have been adopted by the Supreme People's Assembly that March, defines the territory as bordering the Republic of Korea and drops the references to unification.

A constitution on paper is a weak guide here. It promises freedom of speech, the press, assembly and association in Article 67, and freedom of religious belief in Article 68, with the condition that religion must not be used "as a pretext for drawing in foreign forces or for harming the State or social order". Britannica's summary is that the state confirms freedom of religion in its constitution and does not practise it.

How the Workers' Party stands above the state

The sentence that matters most is Article 11: the state "shall conduct all activities under the leadership of the Workers' Party of Korea". The party was founded in its present form in 1949 from northern and southern communist parties, and it is the institution through which every other body is run. Party members form the majority in all state organs, party groups inside them answer to the Central Committee, and the Organization and Guidance Department supervises them.

How the party organises itself

The highest organ of the party is its congress, due at least every fifth year, which elects the general secretary and the Central Committee. The committee in turn elects the Presidium, the Politburo, the Secretariat, the Central Military Commission and the Central Auditing Commission. The rule has not always been kept: the 7th Congress in May 2016 was the first for 36 years. The 8th met in January 2021 and restored the post of general secretary. At the 9th, in 2026, the party amended its rules and removed all references to Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism, the name the state had used for its official ideology.

Two other legal parties exist, the Korean Social Democratic Party and the Chondoist Chongu Party, and both must accept the leading role of the Workers' Party. Every elected candidate belongs to the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Korea, a popular front the party controls, and more than 100 mass organisations sit beneath it, among them the youth league, the women's union and the trade union federation. Citizens who do not join the party are required to join one of them.

Party membership is a figure that stopped being published. The estimate in circulation in 2026 is about 6.5 million; the last figures the party gave were these:

Who sits in the Supreme People's Assembly

Article 87 makes the Supreme People's Assembly "the highest organ of State power", and Article 88 gives it legislative power. Its deputies are elected for five years by universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot, and every citizen aged 17 or over may vote and stand. The assembly meets in sessions of about a week, once or twice a year, and its Standing Committee, called the Presidium in the 2016 text, holds most of its powers in between and alone may interpret the constitution and the laws.

The ballot carries one name. Britannica notes that the party draws up the lists of approved candidates and that there is seldom more than one candidate per constituency. A voter who wants to reject the candidate must cross out the name in a separate booth in front of an election official, a step that, according to many defectors, is too risky to contemplate. Freedom House reported that elections expected in the spring of 2024 did not take place, citing analysts who suggested the leadership wanted its constitutional changes in place before the polls, and Article 90 allows the assembly's term to be prolonged when "unavoidable circumstances render an election impossible".

The Inter-Parliamentary Union records the assembly's composition from what the assembly reports:

The IPU also lists 687 seats in 1990 and 655 in 1986, and its file records the assembly as having no IPU membership in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Who holds executive power

Article 100 makes the Chairman of the State Affairs Commission "the supreme leader" of the state, and Article 102 makes the same office supreme commander of all the armed forces. The chairman directs the overall affairs of the state, appoints and removes key cadres, ratifies and rescinds major treaties and may declare a state of war. His term runs with the assembly's, and the assembly elects or recalls him. In practice, Britannica notes, the government is under one-man leadership: the same person leads the party, chairs the State Affairs Commission and commands the armed forces.

The title of the top office has changed with each leader. Kim Il Sung was premier from 1948 and president from 1972 until his death in 1994. His son took three years to assume his posts: general secretary of the party in 1997 and, in 1998, chairman of the National Defence Commission, which the constitution then made the highest post in the state, while the presidency was abolished. The State Affairs Commission replaced that commission in 2016.

Above the offices sits a doctrine. The Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System set standards for government and for personal conduct and require absolute obedience to the ruling family, which state usage calls the Mount Paektu bloodline. The birthdays of the first two leaders, 15 April and 16 February, are public holidays, and Kim Il Sung University, Kim Il Sung Stadium and Kim Il Sung Square carry the founder's name.

The cabinet, under a premier elected by the assembly, is defined in Article 123 as the administrative and executive body of state power. It drafts the state plan and runs the economy. The President of the Standing Committee of the assembly represents the state formally and receives the credentials of foreign ambassadors.

How the courts and local government work

Judicial authority rests with the Central Court, also rendered in English as the Supreme Court, whose judges the assembly elects, and with provincial and people's courts elected by local assemblies. Britannica notes that judges are usually party members or under party control, and that the public prosecutors' offices both handle criminal cases and keep surveillance over citizens.

Locally the country is divided into nine provinces, the directly governed city of Pyongyang, the special city of Rason and special administrative regions. Each province, city and county has a people's assembly elected for four years under Article 139 and a people's committee that administers. Party committees at every level "guide" them, in Britannica's word.

How the state watches its own citizens

Britannica describes an internal security system that monitors movement and social life down to the household. The Ministry of Public Security is the national police, and political control and counterintelligence belong to the State Security Department. Travel between provinces or abroad without approval is illegal, Human Rights Watch reported in its 2025 report, and as of September 2024 guards on the northern border were still under orders, based on a decree of August 2020, to shoot anyone trying to leave without permission.

Outside assessments of the system are dated and attributed:

• In 2014 a UN Commission of Inquiry found that the state had committed crimes against humanity.
• Human Rights Watch, citing reporting by Daily NK, recorded in its 2025 report sentences of seven and fifteen years' labour handed down in 2024 over the loan of a memory card holding South Korean films.
• Freedom House's report for 2025 scored political rights at 0 of 40 and civil liberties at 3 of 60, and noted research by the Stimson Center on the state's growing digital monitoring of smartphone users, who can reach a state intranet but not the internet.
• Estimates built from satellite images and defectors' testimony put about 200,000 prisoners in six large camps.

The government rejects these findings. In a report to the UN in 2014 it dismissed accusations of atrocities as wild rumours and called the campaign against it a smear, while acknowledging some problems with living conditions that it said it was working to improve.

Where the army sits in the state

Article 86 calls national defence "the supreme duty and honour of citizens". The military-first policy of songun was adopted in 1998, and Britannica describes it as placing the army above the other concerns of state. All men and some women are conscripted, officially for three to four years and in practice for longer.

How large the army is and what it costs are estimates:

The nuclear programme is covered in the history article. Since 2006 the UN Security Council has passed sanctions resolutions against it, and on 28 March 2024 Russia vetoed the renewal of the Panel of Experts that had monitored them for 14 years, 13 votes to 1 with China abstaining.

Who North Korea stands with

North Korea joined the United Nations on 17 September 1991, together with South Korea, and the Non-Aligned Movement in 1975. It belongs to the Group of 77 and the ASEAN Regional Forum, and in 2015 it had diplomatic relations with 166 countries and embassies in 47. Many of the embassies accredited to it sit in Beijing.

China has a defence agreement with it and sent troops into the war in 1950; Russia signed a defence agreement with it in 2024, and Human Rights Watch reported troops and materiel sent that year to support Russia's war in Ukraine. Relations with Japan have been shaped since the 1970s and 1980s by the abduction of at least 13 Japanese citizens by North Korean agents. The United States has no diplomatic relations; Sweden acts as its protecting power through the embassy in Pyongyang, and the United Kingdom has no embassy presence there. With South Korea the state abandoned its claim to the whole peninsula in 2024 and now defines the South as a hostile state.