North Korea released the full text of its revised constitution on Wednesday, and the rewrite draws South Korea out of the language of reunification and into the language of separation. The new text defines South Korea as a separate neighboring state and removes provisions tied to bringing the peninsula back together.
The timing matters because the document shows how far Kim Jong-un has pushed his two-state line from rhetoric into law. In the revised constitution, the chairman of the State Affairs Commission is given command over North Korea’s nuclear forces, along with the power to delegate authority to use nuclear weapons to the state nuclear command organization.
The changes also make the border question more explicit, though not fully precise. Article 2 now describes North Korea’s territory as land bordering the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south. The text names South Korea, China and Russia as countries sharing a border with North Korea, but it does not spell out the exact land or maritime boundaries.
That leaves the new constitutional map cleaner in form than in detail. South Korea is treated as a separate neighboring state, but the revised document does not use the harsher labels “No. 1 hostile state” or “invariable principal enemy,” even as it strips out reunification language that had long anchored the old framework.
The rewrite largely matches a revised constitution that South Korea’s Ministry of Unification obtained and released in May, and it appears after months in which the constitution section of North Korea’s Naenara website was disabled in March 2024. Kim had already described inter-Korean relations as those between “two belligerent states” in late 2023, and at a Supreme People's Assembly meeting in January 2024 he ordered the removal of references to the “northern half” of Korea and to “independence, peaceful reunification and great national unity.”
What remains unclear is whether all of the text now public was actually published in full, or whether some passages were left out. The public version omits part of Article 121 on the Cabinet’s authority to adopt resolutions at plenary meetings, and part of Article 156 on how people’s assessors are elected to special courts. For now, the revised constitution is most useful for what it confirms: North Korea has turned a political break with South Korea into a constitutional one.
