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South Korea HUMAN RIGHTS
Traditional Korean political thought, rooted in neoConfuciansism , placed some emphasis on benevolent rule and on the
government's paternalistic responsibility to redress grievances
of the population. These ideas were carried further in the
nineteenth century by the Tonghak Movement (tonghak means
Eastern Learning), which espoused equality of the sexes and of
social classes. Interest among Koreans in modern human rights,
however, and especially in civil and political rights protected
by law, began late in the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910) with the
natural rights ideas of enlightenment movement (kaehwa)
reformers, such as Kim Ok-kyun, So Chae-p'il, and Pak Yong-hyo
(see The Choson Dynasty
, ch. 1).
The Japanese colonial period (1910-45) saw further diffusion
of such ideas. In 1919 Koreans who had fled Japanese colonial
rule established a government-in-exile in Shanghai that affirmed
wide-ranging civil and political rights--freedoms of the ballot,
religion, press, movement, property, and social and sexual
equality. Within Korea in the 1920s, labor and tenant farmers
unions spread the idea of rights and provided experience in
organizational and protest techniques. As colonial rule
continued, many Korean nationalists came to assume the
desirability of a modern legal order and due process of law,
especially while experiencing dual legal standards and abuses
such as torture and fabrication of evidence in political cases.
Koreans serving in the colonial police and receiving training in
the Japanese Imperial Army often absorbed the increasingly
stringent and authoritarian perspective of Japanese militarism.
Human rights performance did not immediately improve
following the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule in 1945.
Many factors--national division, ideological conflict, and
violent confrontation even before the outbreak of the Korean War
in 1950--contributed to this problem. Japanese-style practices
held over from the colonial days also were to blame. The United
States Army Military Government in Korea (1945-48), confronted
with serious problems of public order, found itself retaining the
old colonial police apparatus and its Korean personnel
(see South Korea under United States Occupation, 1945-48
, ch. 1). United
States-sponsored legal reforms, such as an effort to institute
habeas corpus in 1946, often failed; attempts by United States
advisors to prevent South Korean police from using torture,
especially in political cases, also were unsuccessful. Under
Syngman Rhee, the South Korea continued the prewar pattern of
using law and the police for political purposes--intimidating the
judiciary, arresting journalists, and applying extralegal
pressures against the teaching profession and members of the new
National Assembly.
Under the presidencies of Park and Chun such problems
worsened, and there were increasing signs of tension between the
government and its supporters, who sought to ignore or minimize
such rights and many South Koreans, including some even within
the government, who believed that civil, legal, and political
rights should be honored. This tension was evident in the
affirmations of rights found in most of South Korea's postwar
constitutions and especially in the government's need for
increasingly stringent measures to control a restive judiciary
under the yusin constitution. The forced resignations of
judges and the resort to military tribunals in some political
trials were justified on national security grounds, but only
served to show that by the mid-1970s the government was, on such
matters, no longer able to command the respect and cooperation of
a significant part of the country's legal profession.
The Chun government modified some of the worst features of
the yusin constitution, by removing the admissibility of
confessions as evidence, for example, but continued most of the
abusive police and judicial practices of the Park period with
little change. Penal sentences for people found guilty of
offenses under certain politically relevant laws--the National
Security Act and the Act Concerning Assembly and Demonstration,
for example--actually were harsher under Chun than under the
preceding yusin system.
In addition to the growing disaffection of the legal
profession in the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea's modernization
had generated two social trends--rapid urbanization and dramatic
increases in literacy and education levels--that were essential
to industrialization, irreversible, and highly corrosive of
traditional authoritarian practices. Public outrage against the
police torture and killing of a student during an interrogation
in early 1987 helped to fuel the growing political crisis that
culminated in the tulmultuous events in June.
The agreement in late 1989 between opposition and government
parties concerning the legacy of the Fifth Republic left
unresolved the question of what the press and many politicians
referred to as revision of akpop (evil laws). These were
laws long used in South Korea to restrict and punish nonviolent
political activity. The abolition in 1988 of one such law, the
Basic Press Act of December 1980, had important and immediate
effects on freedom of the press. Other laws remained on the
statute books and were increasingly used in 1989 as the Roh
administration reached the apparent limits of its willingness to
tolerate dissent. Despite Roh's initial reputation for
moderation, police records reported in the press show that by
late 1989 the Roh government had more than doubled the Chun
administration's rate of arrests for political offenses.
As measured in numbers of persons under investigation,
standing trial, or serving sentences, the Act Concerning Assembly
and Demonstration continued under Roh, as under the Fifth
Republic, to be the law most frequently used to restrict and
control nonviolent political expression. The law gave police
chiefs, of whom there were twenty-four in Seoul alone, the
authority to deny permission, without appeal, for any proposed
demonstration. Police also had wide discretion over treatment of
participants in illegal demonstrations, determining whether a
given participant was to be charged with sponsoring an illegal
demonstration, which carried the threat of a seven-year prison
term, or with varying degrees of participation, which could be
punished as a misdemeanor or even with a simple warning. Police
had on occasion taken actions under the law to prevent persons
from attending meetings that the police believed were "likely to
breed social unrest."
The National Security Act, as amended in 1980, restricted
"antistate activities" that endangered "the state or the lives
and freedom of the citizenry." However, Seoul used the law not
only against espionage or sabotage, but also to control and
punish domestic dissent, such as the publication of unorthodox
political commentary, art, or literature, on the grounds that
such expressions benefited an "antistate organization." In
divided Korea, almost any act of opposition to the South Korean
government could be and has been characterized as benefiting
North Korea. Arrests under the law have been made for a wide
variety of actions, including the sale of cassette tapes
containing antigovernment songs; the sale, possession, or reading
of books and other publications on the government's banned list;
or chanting anti-American slogans at a student rally. Ordinary
procedural protections of the Code of Criminal Procedure were not
provided for defendants for offenses under this law. Any liaison
with antistate organizations was also punishable under the law,
although in the late 1980s there was considerable debate
concerning the government's selectivity in allowing some
politicians and businessmen to travel to North Korea or meet with
North Korean officials while severely punishing critics of the
government who did the same thing. There was a surge in
prosecutions for various offenses under the National Security Act
in 1989, despite continuing talk of amending the law to
facilitate broader contacts with the north. In early 1990, as the
third year of Roh's administration began and as the government
mulled over plans to sign several international agreements
concerning human rights, it was still unclear whether or when the
promise of Roh's 1988 inaugural speech, that "the day when
freedoms and human rights could be slighted in the name of
economic growth and national security has ended," would be
redeemed.
Data as of June 1990
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