Legal System of North Korea

North Korea operates a codified civil-law system inherited from the Japanese colonial administration and reshaped by Soviet legal models, organized under the Socialist Constitution into a three-tier court structure of a Central Court, provincial courts and county courts. As of December 2015 the country had roughly 236 laws and regulations in force, about half of them addressing economic management. The penal code invokes the principle of nullum crimen sine lege, no punishment without law, though in practice it functions as a tool of political control despite amendments that have reduced its ideological language, and it treats political and ordinary criminal offenders differently, with political prisoners and their families facing harsher confinement in labor camps separate from the correctional facilities used for ordinary crime. Formal law occupies a subordinate place in North Korea's real hierarchy of authority: the personal directives of the country's leader rank above the constitution itself, and civil law does not bind the ruling party.