17 September 2026 marks 35 years since South Korea and North Korea were admitted to the United Nations. The 1991 event was unusual because the two Korean states became UN members on the same day.

The General Assembly adopted Resolution 46/1, entitled “Admission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea to membership in the United Nations”. The UN Digital Library records that the resolution was adopted without a vote. Through that decision the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea became members of the organisation founded in 1945.

Their admission came during a period of major change in the international system, near the end of the Cold War. The two states had existed separately for decades and had fought the Korean War of 1950–1953. The 1953 armistice halted large-scale fighting but was not a peace treaty formally ending the conflict.

Simultaneous admission to the UN did not remove the differences between the two governments, but it did change their status in the international diplomatic system. The current list of member states still gives both the date 17 September 1991.

This is not an assessment of present governments or of contemporary tensions on the Korean Peninsula. It records an institutional fact: two states that each claimed to represent the whole Korean nation were accepted together, on the same day, into the world organisation.

RoAdevăr has also written about UN accessions, including Switzerland’s entry in 2002.

Thirty-five years later, the organisation’s records preserve a concise account of an event of major diplomatic significance: the admission of both Korean states on the same day.

Photo: the UN General Assembly Hall, New York. Photograph by Basil D Soufi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Source consulted: United Nations Digital Library — Resolution 46/1; UN Member States.