북한 살림집법에 대한 고찰

Abstract

The North Korean gevernment enacted the Housing Act in 2009. The law consists of 6 chapters and 63 articles, prescribing the building, assignment, use, and management of a house. It is more of an administrative law than a civil law in that it focuses on how to regulate a state-owned house. It could be assumed that a separate regulation for housing was needed to deal with the rising price of a house and the increase of illegal house trading which cannot be regulated any more by the already existing laws concerning housing. The Housing Act prescribes prohibition regulations on the construction and usage of a house. It also states legal liabilities, such as administrative and criminal ones. It contains regulations about the assignment of houses, the procedure of co-habitation with other households, and that of house bartering, along with the penalties for the breach of those regulations. However, the effectiveness of the Housing Act is questionable because there is a huge gap between the legal system and the reality of housing practice in the North Korea. Recently on June 28, 2012 the North Korean government brought out so-called “the 6․28 measure,” a new economic management system which allows distributing products according to achievement in the sections of agriculture and industry. “Dollarization” is also rapidly in progress. “Dollarization” is a phenomenon of circulating and depending more on dollar than its own currency. If the market economy is introduced into the North Korean society and the income disparity is unavoidable, the emergence of houses trades may be inevitable although it is illegal at the moment. A house is realty but it is taken not for a means of production but for a consumables with the purpose of individual residence. Thus, the private ownership of a house is recognized in the socialist legal principles. A law loses its effectiveness when it ignores the reality in any legal system. In this respect we may expect some changes in the North Korean government policy towards the spread of privately owned houses and transactions of usufruct of state-owned houses.