North Korea’s Kim Jong Un flag redesign moved from symbolism to law on Wednesday, when North Korea released the full text of a revised constitution that treats South Korea as a separate neighboring state and removes reunification provisions. The text was posted on Naenara after the constitution section had been inaccessible for about two years and eight months.
The revised constitution also strengthens Kim’s authority over nuclear forces. It grants the chairman of the State Affairs Commission command over the country’s nuclear forces and allows that chairman to delegate authority to use nuclear weapons to the state nuclear command organization.
Article 2 and South Korea
Article 2 now defines North Korea’s territory as land bordering China and Russia to the north and South Korea to the south. The wording names South Korea alongside China and Russia as a country sharing a border with North Korea, while the text does not specify exact land or maritime boundaries.
That framing tracks the policy North Korea has already pushed in public. Kim described inter-Korean relations as those between “two belligerent states” at the plenary meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party in late 2023, and at a Supreme People's Assembly meeting in January 2024 he ordered the removal of constitutional references to the “northern half” of Korea and the principles of “independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity.”
Naenara’s missing passages
The version released on Wednesday largely matches the revised constitution South Korea's Ministry of Unification obtained in May. That gives the public text a second point of reference: a later posting on Naenara that lines up with a document already circulated outside North Korea.
But the public version also leaves out part of Article 121, which governs the Cabinet’s authority to adopt resolutions at plenary meetings, and part of Article 156, which outlines how people’s assessors, or lay judges, are elected to special courts. Those gaps mean the posted text reads as a revision, not yet a fully transparent public record of every amendment line by line.
For readers tracking North Korea’s legal posture, the immediate change is not just the removal of reunification language. It is that South Korea now appears in the constitution as a separate state on North Korea’s border, while Kim’s nuclear command authority is written more directly into the state’s top legal text.
