There is extremely limited information around North Korea’s legal identity systems. According to NK News, the main legal identity document revolves around ID cards available for citizens, foreigners, and stateless persons.[1]
The citizens’ ID card is a mandatory card issued to all citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) upon reaching the age of 17.[2] The card includes an individual’s name, sex, date of birth, ethnicity, place of birth and residence, marital status, unique personal number, issuance date, and blood type.[3] For residents living in Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, they are issued a ‘Pyongyang resident identity card’ instead, which is similar to the citizen’s ID card. This resident card emerged in the late 1990s as a form of migration control since residents living outside the capital needed a permit to enter.[4]
In February 2019, the North Korean government announced it had completed the rollout of its new electronic chip-embedded registration cards in cities and towns. Residents living in remote or very small counties were excluded from the initial phase.[5] Nine months later in November 2019, the government announced that this new ID card would be rolled out to residents in rural and mountainous regions as well.[6] There is reportedly no fee for the new cards, but all citizens are required to take blood tests, have new ID photos taken, and provide fingerprint data for them.[7] Radio Free Asia reported that residents in rural areas expressed concerns that the rollout of the new ID cards prioritized cities earlier in the year, with rural areas addressed at a later stage.[8] In the same article, some residents criticized the plan for the new ID cards to be issued on an eight-year cycle, saying authorities could use the system to label citizens who do not obtain the new card as ‘defectors’ who have left North Korea.[9] According to reporting by Daily NK, authorities launched a large-scale citizen registration verification campaign in May 2025 requiring citizens to re-confirm their personal registration data in the South Pyongan province.[10] These efforts are reportedly aimed at identifying individuals living ‘illegally’ without documentation or ‘people who registered as having left the province due to exile or relocation measures but didn’t leave’.[11]
For foreigners, there are three types of ID. The first is a tourist ID for those visiting the country which includes an individual’s name transliterated to Korean, citizenship, ethnicity, date of birth, and home address.[12] The second is a permanent stay certificate (sangju) for those with a long-term visa.[13] The third is a foreigner’s identity document, a certificate of permanent residence of DPRK, typically held by the Chinese residents of North Korea (Hwagyo, meaning ‘overseas Chinese’).[14] The Hwagyo are descendants of Chinese people who settled in the Korean peninsula prior to the founding of North and South Korea.[15]
The last ID card, a stateless person’s identity document, exists mainly to address the stateless persons of Chinese diaspora living in North Korea in the early 1970s who were given a choice to reinstate their Chinese citizenship.[16] Those wanting to reinstate their Chinese citizenship had to firstly renounce their North Korean citizenship and became stateless. They were then issued a stateless persons’ identity documents by the DPRK. Thereafter, the Chinese government reinstated them as Chinese citizens.[17]
Birth registration includes a birth certificate issued when a child is born that includes the citizen’s name, date of birth, sex, ethnicity, parents’ names, place of birth and residence.[18] There is no available information about the birth registration process for foreign nationals, stateless persons, refugees, or asylum seekers.
According to Article 7 of the Citizen Registration Act 1997, amended in 2015, the legal identity documents confirming one’s citizenship of the DPRK are a birth certificate, a citizen identity card, and in some cases, a Pyongyang Resident Identity Card.[19]
In addition to legal identity documents, an individual’s social status and access to rights in the DPRK are shaped by the songbun family registration and classification system, which records perceived socio-political background (known as social songbun) and family history (known as birth songbun).[20] The system groups people into one of four categories, soldier, office worker, worker, or farmer, which reportedly affects access to education, employment, and mobility.[21] While songbun is not a legal identity document, each individual is assigned a ‘songbun number’ that is generated based on their birth certificate and citizen ID card.[22]
