Social rights in North Korea: between constitutional utopia and the ideological pragmatism of songbun through the lens of T. H. Marshall’s Theory

Abstract

The article provides a comprehensive constitutional and legal analysis of social rights enshrined in the Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), compared with the benchmark model of the social rule-of-law state of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The historical evolution of the constitutional consolidation of social rights in DPRK is traced: from the first Constitution of 1948, drafted with the direct participation of the Soviet side, through the Socialist Constitution of 1972, revisions of 1992, 1998, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2016 and up to the latest amendments of March 2026. It is established that the broad catalogue of social rights formally enshrined in the Basic Law of the DPRK (the right to work, rest, free medical care, education, equality) lacks procedural mechanisms of implementation and judicial protection. It is proved that under the conditions of the Juche ideology, the monopoly of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the class stratification through the songbun system, social guarantees lose the properties of subjective rights and function as an instrument of political legitimation of an authoritarian regime. The scientific concept of ‘performative (decorative) constitutionalism’ is proposed to describe the DPRK constitutional model, in which the formal legal text performs a purely communicative function and does not give rise to legal obligations of the state to the individual. Based on T. H. Marshall’s theory of citizenship, the thesis is substantiated that social rights cannot exist in isolation from civil and political rights, and in case of such isolation they turn into an instrument of paternalistic control.