NK TechLab Law Database
NK TechLab, a new project of 38 North, will be creating and publishing data obtained from North Korean technology that may be useful to scholars and researchers.
Recently, the project gained access to a North Korean smartphone that included an app called “조선민주주의인민공화국 버저,” which is a database of North Korean laws current to mid-2024. Several of these laws and updates have never been published outside of North Korea.
Today, we are publishing the complete text of 33 laws.
For other laws, we recommend readers consult the excellent bi-annual compendium of North Korean laws published by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, “北韓法令集”.
If you have any questions or requests regarding additional laws, please get in touch.
Caveats
It was not possible to directly export the text of the laws electronically from the phone, so screenshots were taken and run through a character recognition system to configure the text into a format suitable for publication.
The resulting text has not been checked for accuracy; it is possible the character recognition system might have “corrected” some North Korean spellings to South Korean spellings as part of its error correction. If you have questions about a particular article or phrase used and would like to see the original, please contact us.
Each law is accompanied by a machine translation into English, produced by the May 2025 version of Microsoft Copilot. The English version is provided for the convenience of readers, and no guarantee is made for its precision.