As everybody in North Korea, and, for that matter, all communist countries knows, the supreme power in the nation is the Central Committee of the Party, as well as its Secretariat. However, such bodies, in spite of their tremendous power and political significance, are not even mentioned in the Constitution of the DPRK. This is an interesting paradox of communist states: They were (and those that remain still are) run by the party, but the party itself, including its structure and chain of command, was almost never described officially and remains, to a large extent, outside the formal legal system. In essence, it was a shadow government, the existence of which was known to everybody.

At the very top of the structure, there is the Central Committee, a gathering of a few hundred or even a few thousand top functionaries which even in more liberal communist state met only for short sessions two or three times a year. In North Korea, as far as we know, since Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 sessions of the Central Committee have been very irregular. In practice, the role of the Central Committee is small. Like the Supreme People’s Assembly, it exists nowadays to express unanimous support for the decision of the Leader and also to vote for the lists of the new Permanent Committee (Politburo) and Secretariat members. The Secretariat’s job is to supervise the bureaucracy of the Central Committee, i.e. the bureaucracy for the government’s de facto top executive body.