Silenced - South Korea

21/09/2003

South Korea

After the country was damaged by an economic crisis in the mid-1990s, the Korean government declared that one solution for reviving the economy lay in the development of ICTs. What followed was a widespread restructuring and the development of policies to promote ICTs, as well as the construction of a nation-wide, high-speed telecommunication network. Due to such efforts, the industry has developed significantly with the result that by November 2002 the number of high-speed Internet Broadband subscribers exceeded 10 million.

Korea was one of the first countries to adopt a law limiting free speech on the Internet. In 1995, The National Assembly amended the Electronic Communication Business Law to include a new provision on the “regulation of dangerous communications.” It authorised the Ministry of Information and Communication to regulate “dangerous communications” and delegated the regulatory power to the Information and Communication Ethics Committee (ICEC). The regulation has been used to block websites of the anti-military movement, homosexual rights and school dropouts.

In 1999, a user who had posted an opinion about a battle a few days earlier between the South Korea and North Korea navies in West Sea of Korea was blocked from logging onto his account by order of the Ministry and his article was removed. He took the matter to the Constitutional Court, which on June 27, 2002, ruled that the “dangerous communications” provision of the law were unconstitutional because it violated freedom of speech. In November, 2002, the National Assembly amended the law to now regulate “illegal content”. Under the revised law, the MIC can control and delete illegal content on the Internet without any approval or agreement from the court.

The 2001 Ordinance of the Act on Promotion of Utilization of Information and Communication Network compels webmasters to use PICS to label harmful content designated by ICEC. ICEC decides what is harmful content under the Youth Protection Act, which classifies gay and lesbian content as “harmful to youth”. ICEC has designated www.exzone.com, a homosexual website, as harmful on the grounds that it encouraged homosexuality and carried obscene information. The operator of the site and a federation of 15 gay rights associations filed a suit against the government in January 2002 stating that the law violated the constitutional right to free speech. The case is still pending.

The National Security Law gives broad powers to the government to restrict speech and to prevent support or discussion of North Korea. In June 2002, police arrested Kim Kang-pil for posting messages related to North Korea on the Democratic Labor Party’s website. The government claimed his actions violated the National Security Law, Article 7, Clause 1 (an act advantageous to the enemy) and Clause 5 (bringing the materials of profit to the enemy). The first court sentenced him to one year's imprisonment. Kim appealed and was released in December 2002 after the appellate court suspended the sentence for two years. On July 11, 2003, police arrested and restricted Kim, Yong-chan and Kim Jong-gon for possessing books The Captal written by Karl Marx, For Marx by Louis Althusser and The Imagination of the New Left by George Katsiaficas and uploading materials on their Internet community bulletin board about these books and Manifesto of the Communist Party from 1948. This case now is pending.

Copyright law is also used to suppress speech. A group of workers who were opposing a merger of their company to POSCO the largest iron company in Korea, set up a website 'ANTIPOSCO' which was designed in a similar style to POSCO's original website. On April 17, 2000, a court issued a preliminary decision requiring ANTIPOSCO to shut down, accepting POSCO;’s claim that it violated their copyright. This decision was later cancelled in July 2001.

There is also continuing controversy about police access to information on users’ identity. On July 2003, police requested the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) to reveal the identity of the user who uploaded material friendly to North Korea on the internet bulletin board of KCTU website. This request was made under the Protection of Communication Secrets Act, which permits police to request ISPs to reveal without a court warrant the identification of people who use the network. According to Jinbonet, which provides 650 social groups and trade unions with Internet hosting, the police had requested it to reveal user’s identification without any warrant from the court about twice a month. Jinbonet has refused the requests and in May 2002 sued to challenge this law in the constitutional court.

On March 2003, MIC proposed rules to facilitate real identification by compelling the use of National ID number of Korean people before they would be permitted to post on the bulletin boards of all public organizations.

References

International Telecommunications Union statistics report, 2001

http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/

The Lesbian and Gay Alliance Against Discrimination in Korea

http://outpridekorea.com/lgaad

Jinbonet and the Progressive Network Center

http://english.jinbo.net

Citizens Coalition for Media Watch
http://www.mediawatch.or.kr/

Ministry of Information and Communication

www.mic.go.kr

Ruling the Electronic Communication Business law to be unconstitutional

http://www.base21.org/show/show.php?p_docnbr=21832

Declaration to refuse the Internet Contents Rating System

http://www.base21.org/show/show.php?p_docnbr=21120

Don’t use the National Security Law to suppress the Internet!

http://www.base21.org/show/show.php?p_cd=209&p_dv=0&p_docnbr=22659