Delegates from across North Korea are expected to discuss defining South Korea as the “No.1 hostile country” in the North’s constitution if they hold a parliamentary meeting on Monday as previously announced.
North Korea convenes the Supreme People’s Assembly once or twice a year to decide national matters, including budgets, legal revisions and agency personnel.
Representatives to the legislative session are expected to confer in line with a speech delivered by the country’s leader Kim Jong Un at the previous parliamentary gathering in January.
Kim ordered attendees at the time to amend the constitution to stipulate that South Korea is the “No.1 hostile country.” He also said expressions, such as peaceful unification, should be deleted from the constitution.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency quotes an official of the country’s Unification Ministry as saying members of the Supreme People’s Assembly are likely to scrap the Inter-Korean Basic Agreement signed by Seoul and Pyongyang in 1991.
The deal commits the two Koreas to non-interference in each other’s internal affairs and to barring sabotage or overthrow against each other.
Yonhap also reports that attention should be paid to whether the North Korean legislature will ratify a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty signed by Pyongyang and Moscow in June this year.
The pact’s text released by North Korea says the two countries will provide mutual military assistance if one of them is put in a state of war by an armed invasion.