North Korea’s ruling party issued an urgent order to re-vet every child selected to attend celebrations in Pyongyang for the Korean Children’s Union’s 80th anniversary in June 2026.
A source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK on Tuesday that the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea issued the order on May 31. The directive stressed the need to block any misbehavior by event participants in advance. It ordered officials to thoroughly re-screen all final selectees and assemble them in Pyongyang by June 3.
The Korean Children’s Union is the party’s mass organization for schoolchildren, who join at around age seven. The organization was founded on June 6, 1946.
The core message of the directive was that not a single safety incident or discipline violation would be tolerated during the large-scale celebrations. Officials in the organizations involved reportedly scrambled in a state of extreme tension to re-vet every delegate selected from across the country.
The directive identified thorough vetting as the most important task. The goal was to prevent any incidents while delegates traveled to Pyongyang and waited for the event to begin. The order aimed to completely block any uncontrolled departures or misbehavior that could occur while young students from across the country gathered in the capital.
Officials and parents on edge over Korean Children’s Union vetting
The Central Committee also specified that participants could be finalized only through organizational recommendation and vetting. This served as a stern warning against irregularities by officials of schools and the youth league, the Socialist Patriotic Youth League that oversees young North Koreans, who were involved in the selection process.
“The order to re-vet every single delegate without exception was enough to fluster the officials who had already chosen them, with the event right around the corner,” the source said.
Youth league officials under the South Pyongan provincial party committee and the Nampo city party committee reportedly lost sleep over the re-vetting. They feared losing their positions if a selected delegate turned out to have been involved in an unsavory incident or caused trouble while traveling to or waiting in Pyongyang.
Parents of the selected delegates also grew anxious and tense. Rather than feeling pride and excitement that their children would travel to Pyongyang for the celebrations, many fretted that the suffocating surveillance of the re-vetting process might flag their children as problems.
“By issuing such an obsessive order ahead of the great occasion of the children’s union’s 80th anniversary, the Central Committee showed its determination to pull off the event without a single blemish,” the source said. “The celebrations are meant to firmly stamp the young generation as the reserve force of socialist construction.”
Reporting from inside North Korea
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June 11, 2026 at 01:55AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)