Making somebody do porridge (or “eat rice and beans”, to make use of the Korean expression) for expressing their political opinions is predicted of despotic North Korea. It shouldn’t be typically related to its affluent, democratic southern neighbor. Yet Lee Yoon-seop, a South Korean poet, is at the moment languishing in jail for simply this. The 68-year-old was sentenced to 14 months in November for threatening South Korea’s “existence and safety”. His crime? Writing a poem in reward of the North.
The regulation used
to prosecute Mr. Lee, the National Security Act (NSA), is designed to guard South Korea from spies and traitors. But it additionally bans South Koreans from visiting or making contact with the North, studying or watching North Korean media or saying something good about Kim Jong Un’s tyrannical regime. Although South Korea changed its former navy dictatorship with a democracy in 1987, such restrictions on free speech present that a number of the generals’ autocratic tendencies endure.
Every nation has counter-espionage legal guidelines. And if South Korea’s are relatively strict, no surprise. Its capital metropolis is in missile vary of a nuclear-armed despot who calls it the “principal enemy”. The NSA was modeled on a regulation designed to quash pro-independence actions throughout Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Since 2003 there have on common been greater than 60 NSA prosecutions a 12 months, usually for fairly clear espionage instances. A businessman and a military officer had been arrested for allegedly promoting navy secrets and techniques to North Korea. Soldiers within the South have been prosecuted below the act for endangering morale by distributing pro-North propaganda.
But the NSA is just too usually used to prosecute satirists and raid the houses and workplaces of leftists. Some instances have been ridiculous. Kim Myeong-soo, a PhD pupil, obtained six months in jail and a two-year suspended sentence for promoting books on North Korea that had been extensively out there in public libraries. A South Korean lady was given a two-year sentence, suspended for 4 years, for proudly owning recordings of 14 North Korean songs.
This shouldn’t be Mr. Lee’s first offense. But the declare that the sexagenarian posed a risk to South Korea is absurd. His ode was revealed on a North Korean web site. Access to such websites is banned by the NSA and prohibited from a South Korean IP deal with. More importantly, it’s laborious to think about Mr. Lee’s infantile verse persuading anybody of the glories of North Korea’s chief. It consists of an inventory of South Korean issues that Mr. Kim, within the poet’s view, would immediately resolve given the prospect.
Yet even a extra liberal authorities could be unlikely to take away the NSA’s intolerant clauses. No administration has made a critical try to handle it in 20 years. There isn’t any vital political assist for scrapping the regulation, level out Steven Denney and Christopher Green of Leiden University. The present administration at the very least flirted with permitting South Koreans entry to North Korean media, however just lately deserted the concept. The opposing Democratic Party isn’t any extra liberal; it beforehand tried to go an identical regulation criminalizing reward of Japanese colonial rule.
Mr. Yoon usually talks about South Korea’s democratic values. They are on the coronary heart of his pitch for the nation to be a strategic hyperlink between East and West, developed and growing nations. For that motive alone he ought to take them extra significantly. South Korea is undoubtedly a democracy, however not a very liberal one so long as it locks up outdated males for his or her dotty opinions. Reforming the NSA could be a greater rebuttal to the sentiment Mr. Lee expressed than banning it.
Read extra from Banyan, our columnist on Asia: How Hindu is India’s overseas coverage? (Jan twenty second) The favourite in Indonesia’s presidential election has a sordid previous (Jan eleventh) Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s prime minister, is losing his alternative (Dec thirty first)
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