Constitution of North Korea

The Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea () is the constitution of North Korea. It was approved by the 6th Supreme People's Assembly at its first session on 27 December 1972, and has been amended and supplemented in 1998, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2016 and twice in 2019. It replaced the country's first constitution which was approved in 1948. The constitution consists of seven chapters and 172 articles and codifies North Korea's basic principles on politics, economy, culture and national defense, the basic rights and duties of the country's citizens, the organization of the North Korean government and the country's national symbols. North Korea is also governed by the Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System, which some claim have come to supersede the constitution and in practice serve as the supreme law of the country. North Korea began to draft its first constitution following the convention of the South Korean Interim Legislative Assembly on 12 December 1946 which began to draft an interim constitution for South Korea and the failure to establish a unified provisional government in Korea due to the collapse of the US-Soviet Joint Commission on 21 October 1947. In November 1947, the People's Assembly of North Korea organized a 31-member committee to enact a provisional constitution. A draft provisional constitution was presented to the People's Assembly of North Korea in February 1948, and it was decided to submit it to an "all-people discussion" that was held from 11 February until 25 April 1948. On 10 July 1948, the People's Assembly of North Korea adopted the draft constitution as the Constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which was implemented by the Supreme People's Assembly throughout the Korean peninsula on 8 September 1948. According to Andrei Lankov, the 1948 constitution was personally edited by Joseph Stalin alongside Terentii Shtykov, the head of the Soviet occupation of North Korea, in Moscow, with some of its articles being rewritten later by Soviet supervisors.