North Korea’s Supreme Prosecutor’s Office issued an emergency order Jan. 19 activating a long-dormant legal provision that allows the replacement of corrupt prosecutors at major universities, a Daily NK source in Pyongyang said recently. The order targets prosecutors who accept bribes from powerful parents to shield their children from investigation for anti-socialist behavior.
When university students whose parents are officials are implicated in crimes, prosecutors often take bribes to look the other way. The latest order demonstrates the central government’s firm intention to use the legal system to end this phenomenon.
In particular, the order included North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s angry demands that “rotten buds be pruned” and that “the children of officials be revolutionized if their ideology is rotten.” In North Korean parlance, “revolutionized” means reeducated through prison or forced labor. People thus view the order not as a simple administrative directive but as a declaration of war demanding that prosecutors get their house in order.
Kim’s fury sparks legal crackdown
According to the source, the order was sparked when a Central Committee inspection discovered that the prosecutor handling an incident at a university in Pyongyang tried to minimize the case, excluding the children of senior officials from investigation while framing powerless students.
Kim Jong Un was reportedly irate when he received a report of the inspection, saying that “young people were the future ranks of the party, and that prosecutors responsible for universities were ruining the future of the revolution for a few coins rather than pruning rotten buds.” He ordered that the “right to apply to change investigators” in the country’s codex “must not be a mere decoration,” and that people “should be able to replace prosecutors who smell rotten immediately.”
North Korea’s Criminal Procedure Law includes articles concerning applications to change litigation parties and the processing of these applications. According to a copy of the country’s Criminal Procedure Law — amended in February 2025 — obtained by Daily NK, people can apply to change litigation parties on specific grounds as stipulated in law, or because they violated their appointed duties (Article 20), and that investigator, prosecutor or prosecutorial agency manager who receives such an application must process it within three days (Article 21).
“Before, individual prosecutors had so much power that it was impossible to demand their replacement — even if you applied, it was often ignored. But the order demanded that the legal system be strictly implemented going forward,” the source said. “Particularly striking is that the right to apply to replace prosecutors was granted not only to parties to a case, but also to university party committees and the Socialist Patriotic Youth League.”
In other words, university party committees and the Socialist Patriotic Youth League can now point to the law and apply for the immediate replacement of a prosecutor who appears to be covering for a particular student.
“The order seeks to use the law to root out the practice of giving passes to the children of officials when the authorities view young people’s anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior as a threat to the regime,” the source said.
After the order was issued, prosecutors in charge of universities went on a state of high alert.
More than ever, prosecutors feel they must handle incidents involving students by the book, since they never know when somebody will apply for their replacement during the investigation or indictment. Prosecutors who have survived on bribes are devastated, complaining that they must now “fear even taking a carton of smokes.”
Reporting from inside North Korea
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