Analysis and Evaluation of North Korea’s Social Control Laws Since 2020: Focusing on Laws Containing Death Penalty Provision

Since 2020, North Korea has enacted and revised laws for epidemic control and ideological and information control purposes, including the Emergency Quarantine Law(EQL), the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act(RICRA), the Youth Education Security Act, the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act(PCLPA) and the Enemy Material Disposal Act(EMDA). Public executions are carried out based on death penalty provisions of the EQL, RICRA and PCLPA. EMDA also includes a death penalty provision, and controls over the influx of information have been strengthened compared to RICRA. The Disaster Prevention, Rescue and Recovery Act, revised in 2022, also introduced new provisions for death penalty. In 2023, the North Korean authorities amended the Criminal Law, removing the unification clauses and expanding the death penalty provisions from 11 to 16. The aim of this revision is to enhance the development of weapons, protect the safety of Kim Jong-un's family, and strengthen regime security, reflecting the principle of ‘Our State First.’ People’s Unit Organization and Operation Act aims to strengthen population control by reinforcing people’s unit organization and role and by expanding people’s unit leader’s preferential treatment and role. In response to North Korea’s ideological and information control, efforts to promote right to access information shall be continue. Also efforts shall be made to develop and diversify information and cultural content that can help North Korean citizens develop a sense of human rights based on universality, as well as understand the importance and value of freedom. In response to North Korea's hostile dual state theory and denial of the concept of the same ethnicity, we should strengthen the connection between the right to access information and the right to self-determination by conveying the message that both South and North Korean citizens are the same ethnicity and must reunite as one nation.