"This is a sad case of the South Korean authorities' complete failure to understand sarcasm."
South Korea is significantly less awful than North Korea— though what country or thing isn't? — but it can't be all giving money to escaped North Korean refugees and helping them resettle; in their efforts to be the superior Korea, South Korea is overcompensating.
In early February, 24-year-old Socialist Party member and South Korean Park Jeonggeun was charged under his country's 1948 National Security Law which criminalizes any glorification of North Korea. Pro-North Korea sites are also blocked in the South.
One of his crimes? He retweeted "Long Live Kim-Jong Il" from the official North Korean twitter account. He also doctored photos of North Korean soldiers when he "replaced a smiling North Korean soldier's face with a downcast version of my own face and the soldier's weapon with a bottle of whisky." Jeonggeun is a member of a party which opposes North Korea (it takes extra effort to spin slavery and gulags into worker solidarity, in spite of the dire associates that "socialist party" brings up.) He pleads that his retweets and other forms of expression were just mocking his cousins to the North. But he also is making the argument that he has the right to do this; "Even though I disagree with North Korean communism, I'm interested in North Korean culture and have a right to know about it," he said.
Jeonggeun faces up to seven years in prison for his crimes. Amnesty International have taken up his case and their Asia-Pacific director summed it up, "This is not a national security case, it's a sad case of the South Korean authorities' complete failure to understand sarcasm."
South Korea has stepped up enforcement of the NSL in recent years. According to Amnesty, there were a rash of tortures and forced confessions over the law in the '70s and '80s when South Korea's military ruled; today it's often used to squish people who are not keen on every single aspect of South Korean policy toward the North; the BBC says prosecutions under the law "tripled under the current administration."
Of course it's not all oppression in response to satire or honest questioning of foreign policy. Sometimes it's oppression in response to this guy who is accused of building a shrine to sincerely honor Kim Jong-Il.
Reason on North Korea
