North Korea’s fisheries law and cross-border fisheries governance: a doctrinal assessment of domestic control and regional transparency

Large-scale illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in waters claimed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been documented mainly through satellite analysis and sanctions-enforcement studies. However, these approaches reveal little about how the DPRK’s own law structures authority, access, inspection, and legal responsibility. This article uses doctrinal legal analysis to examine the DPRK Fisheries Law using the accessible 2015 and 2022 consolidated texts, the 20 May 2025 amendment—used as a confirmatory and contextual extension—and the broader amendment history reflected in earlier legal materials. The statute is assessed across four governance pillars—conservation and sustainable use; monitoring, control, and surveillance; access authorization and foreign-vessel control; and sanctions and deterrence—against differentiated benchmarks drawn from the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Port State Measures Agreement, the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, and fisheries-related UN sanctions. The 2015 and 2022 texts show partial alignment in conservation planning, protected-resource management, and formal authorization, but persistent gaps remain in monitoring infrastructure, inspection traceability, foreign-access transparency, and cooperative information sharing. While the 2025 amendment confirms a further move toward denser domestic legal responsibility, including direct stoppage measures, steeper fines, and a more differentiated sanction ladder, it lacks a parallel advance in monitoring or transparency. The DPRK framework therefore operates more as an instrument of domestic administrative control than as an integrated component of regional fisheries governance. By grounding this conclusion in the statute’s own internal evolution rather than in vessel-behavior evidence alone, the article provides a more comprehensive legal baseline for future research on fisheries governance in sanctioned, low-transparency settings.