North Hamgyong Province held a meeting early this month to discuss the implementation of the “law on the prevention of violation of the order of procedure,” Daily NK has learned.
A source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Monday that the province held the meeting on Dec. 5 in response to an order calling for meetings on legal compliance regarding the failure to carry out process procedures for economic management and across society according to legally mandated standards, noting that violations continue to occur.
Through the meeting, North Hamgyong Province positively and negatively evaluated how local workplaces were maintaining the state order and which transformations had occurred in the months since the adoption of the law on the prevention of violation of the order of procedure.
At the meeting, five local workplace managers — and deputy managers taking part in lieu of their managers — who were tasked by the province with preparing ahead of time held an independent discussion. They reportedly criticized that workplaces along the province’s fisheries and seas had the most chronic problems.
The source said the meeting pointed out that among agencies and enterprises along the sea, there have been repeated violations of process procedures for issuing fishery entry licenses for the last 20 years since the Arduous March, and corruption such as bribe-taking had become commonplace.
Moreover, the meeting also reportedly said that it has become “natural” for the Second Department of local branches of the Ministry of Social Security to take bribes for issuing travel permits.
The meeting also made some pointed commentary that continued corruption was leading to social hostility on the part of powerless enterprises and poorer citizens who complain of mistaken state policies.
It went even further, slamming how principles had disappeared in economic management and general social order, including in the process procedures for sales of products by local production units and the order for the supply of oil, which now take place only through bribes of money or cigarettes and personal relationships.
The source said the meeting “declared war, intensifying punishments for illegal behavior before the law, saying that there can be an ethos only when unjust practices that have continued for decades are eliminated from the entire province and each local unit draws up plans to comply with the law.”
In fact, the province has begun warning that after the meeting, it will never simply overlook unjust behavior, and that it will strongly punish wrongdoing to root out deep-seated problems.
According to the Rodong Sinmun, the 21st Plenary Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly adopted the law on the prevention of violation of the order of procedure, with the law reflecting “the legal demand for strengthening the order of procedure such as rationalizing the order of procedure in economic management and the whole of society and making institutions, enterprises, organizations and citizens obey the law obligatorily.”
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