This is part one of a two-part series on North Korea’s penal code.

One of the normal things we expect from a country is that it has a set of laws available to the general public, but in the case of North Korea, for some time, its Penal Code was not published at all.

In the early 1950s, the Code was available to the public. By the middle 1950s, the DPRK was publishing only commentaries on the Code, but not the Code itself. Since the late 1960s, nothing was published at all – the law