In South Korea, Freedom of Speech Under Scrutiny

Even before she was elected president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye’s loudest critics saw in her shades of her dictator father, who brutally suppressed dissent during the 1960s and 70s. To her opponents, Park’s almost three years in power have more than justified those fears.

From launching defamation lawsuits against critics to a plan to take over the publishing of history books used at schools, the Park administration’s efforts to control speech have fueled the perception of a leader wed to the same authoritarian ideology as her father Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea from 1961 until his assassination in 1979.  

“There is no need to mince words: Freedom of expression is eroding every day under the current South Korean government,” Se-Woong Koo, editor of the liberal news website Korea Expose, told The Diplomat.

Recently, such concerns have found voice in opposition to Park’s initiative to entrust the state with authoring history textbooks to be used at schools starting in 2017. Along with planned labor reforms, the proposal was the main spark for two mass rallies held in Seoul in recent weeks that attracted an estimated 85,000 people. 

While Park has argued that the textbook plan is necessary to remove pro-North Korea bias in some books, others see the move as a ploy to put a conservative spin on the nation’s turbulent modern history, especially the legacy of her father. The elder Park enjoys considerable respect among older Koreans for overseeing the country’s explosive economic rise, but remains controversial overall for his anti-democratic rule and persecution of opponents. 

Apart from the textbook plan itself, the Park administration’s response to dissent on the issue has further exacerbated her reputation as a leader hostile to free expression. After the anti-government rallies, Park compared some masked protesters with ISIS while calling for a ban on face coverings at public demonstrations. When American journalist Tim Shorrock wrote in The Nation magazine several weeks later that Park was “following in the footsteps of her dictator father,” the South Korean Consulate-General in New York contacted the magazine to complain, the writer claimed. 

“I am afraid that there is a general tendency of press intimidation by the South Korean government that has been increasing over the past three years,” said Lim Og, a journalist at online media outlet NewsPro.

Lim pointed out that South Korea ranked just 60th in this year’s press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders, a drastic fall from its best-ever ranking of 31st in 2006. 

The recent controversies follow a raft of other attempts by the government, or legal authorities under its influence, to manage speech unfavorable to the president. In one incident last month, police questioned a shopkeeper after he put up posters at his premises that called the president a “dictator’s daughter.” Then there was the trial of Kato Tatsuya, the former Seoul bureau chief of Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese daily. Kato faced up to seven years in prison if convicted of defaming the president by repeating rumors about her whereabouts on the day of the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. He was found not guilty in December 2015, but his life was still put on hold for 14 months while he awaited the verdict.

“The government and its ranking figures present the greatest worry, in that they have an outdated notion of what a democratic nation is,” said Koo. “They say they are determined to protect democratic South Korea from far-ranging threats such as North Korea and terrorism. But they clearly have no interest in safeguarding democratic principles including freedom of speech.”

While some see an especially profound threat to free expression under the current president, South Korea has always had severe constraints on expression during its short democratic history.

The country’s constitution does not contain any endorsement of free speech as unambiguous as the First Amendment in the United States. Its protections are qualified with references to public morality, social ethics, and the honor of individuals. 

One especially powerful brake on expression is the National Security Law, an anti-communist statute that potentially makes any praise of North Korea a crime. While seen as a necessarily bulwark against communist contamination from North Korea by many conservatives, the law has come in for repeated criticism from activist groups such as Amnesty International. 

“As (the) NSL includes vaguely worded clauses which allow overly broad application, to intimidate and imprison people simply exercising their human rights, Amnesty International has been calling (on) the government of South Korea to abolish or substantially amend the NSL in line with the country’s international human rights obligations and commitments,” said Hiroka Shoji, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International.

The country’s defamation laws are also notably strict, and have routinely allowed democratically elected administrations, including those from the liberal side of the aisle, to quash criticism. Unlike in much of the democratic world, defamation is treated as a criminal as well as civil matter, carrying the threat of heavy fines or years in jail. 

Whether or not it’s because Korea’s status quo has long been ambivalent about freedom of expression, the public en masse does not seem overly disturbed by Park’s clampdown on speech.

For months, the president’s approval rating has fluctuated in the mid-40s, a relatively strong showing for a mid-tenure president in South Korea, where the public is notorious for eventually turning against its leaders in overwhelming numbers. And while attitudes have since shifted somewhat against the textbook plan, an opinion poll carried out in October by Gallup Korea showed the public evenly spilt on the issue.

If the public remains relatively apathetic about moves to control speech, part of the explanation may lie in different cultural values. In a recent survey of 38 countries carried out by the Pew Research Center, South Koreans were found to be less supportive of freedom of expression than not just people in democratic Western countries, but also those in several developing nations including Kenya, the Philippines, and Peru. 

“The biggest problem is many Koreans don’t think freedom of expression is important,” said Lee Ki-jun, a journalist with Newsweek Korea. “Most of them seem to be satisfied with current level of freedom of expression. They often put many things like public order, national interest, and prestige above it.”