South Korea’s National Intelligence Service recently released a large volume of North Korean legislation that provides new details into how the DPRK legally responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning from early 2020 up to the country’s first official outbreak revealed exactly one year ago. 

Available documents do not include cabinet regulations or all specific orders from Kim Jong Un. But they reveal that North Korea’s legal response to the pandemic occurred over several stages — one revision to the Infection Disease Prevention Law (IDPL) and multiple revisions to the Emergency Anti-epidemic Law (EAL).

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