South Korea’s needless censorship of North Korean material

Author: Martin Weiser, Seoul

South Korea has a free speech problem bigger than its recent ban on sending leaflets into North Korea. North Korea’s official autobiography of Kim Il Sung was sold to the public within South Korean borders by a small publishing company in Seoul, Minjok Sarangbang, since February. A month after this was noticed by the press, the police raided the establishment on 26 May. This is despite the fact that the eight-volume text, first released in Pyongyang in 1992, which covers the late leader’s life from childhood until 1945, is available for free online on North Korean websites. Those websites are, not surprisingly, censored in the South.

The problem for Minjok Sarangbang is that Article 7 of the 1948 National Security Law practically forbids the distribution and possession of North Korean material in South Korea with a maximum sentence of seven years. Despite attempts to pare back the wide scope of this law after South Korea became a democracy in 1987, the National Security Law is still widely abused, often for political purposes. A clause was newly added to its first article in 1991 requiring the law to be applied as little as possible to ensure protecting the security of the state, while it also should not unreasonably limit fundamental human rights. But the South Korean government still has used this law to go after citizens that resell freely available books, create parodies on Twitter, have North Korean music on their USBs or partake in study meetings on North Korea.

When the police raided the publisher and the home of its owner in May for releasing Kim Il Sung’s memoir, they also confiscated all copies of the autobiography, resulting in a practical sales ban. Just a week before the raid, a right-wing organisation had failed to get a court order against sales of the text. But already before the memoir was difficult to purchase as South Korea’s major booksellers had pulled it from their shelves to ‘protect customers’ shortly journalists reported on it in April. One of them cited a Supreme Court decision which approved punishment of those that purchased ‘materials benefiting the enemy,’ not just those that sold them. This possibly referred to a decision of August 2011 when the court had judged the memoir to be such a material and upheld a prison sentence for a South Korean that had bought the memoir during a visit to North Korea.

This classification did not make the text illegal as is sometimes claimed, but put it into an opaque category of ‘special materials’ on which limits to access are applied. Absurdly, selling it to the general public is still illegal, even though anyone can access it at the public North Korea library of the Ministry of Unification. The Publications Ethics Commission that some looked to for a decision evaded involvement. It has no right to judge, it claimed, as the relevant law only lists novels, comics, photo albums and pictures as under the Commission’s control.

It has been legal for one company to import and distribute the memoir since the Ministry of Unification approved it in 2012. But only import and distribution of the text to approved institutions for ‘research purposes’ was made legal, the ministry claimed.

The company that received permission in 2012 to import and distribute the memoir, North-South Exchange Investment Corp, is headed by the same person as the Minjok Sarangbang publisher. Kim Seung-gyun, an elderly South Korean, has resold North Korean publications in the South under an official licence for almost 20 years. 

When he was interviewed by South Korea’s Tongil News, he claimed there was no need for approval in this case and refuted that there were any limits to his right to publish. The law on inter-Korean exchange and cooperation seems to support the bookseller.

Individual calls to reform or abolish the National Security Law have come from both conservatives and progressives, but neither side is willing to risk an election over the issue. A recent survey found that a majority of the population was in favour of abolishing the crucial Article 7. The only age group not in favour was the bloc of South Koreans aged 60 and above which votes mostly conservative. This divide became clear in the 2017 presidential election, when only elderly South Koreans favoured the conservative party’s candidate.

Kim Seung-gyun’s case will likely go to court but a final verdict may not come for years. The incident demonstrates how much of South Korea’s censorship of North Korean materials is out of date, unnecessary, confused, and legally vague, if not outside the law entirely.

Thae Yong-ho, the North Korean diplomat that defected and eventually became a South Korean lawmaker, recently said that he fears any free sale of the Kim Il Sung autobiography would just be the first step to completely lift censorship on North Korean media and publications. For the sake of South Korean democracy, we should hope that it becomes a reality.

Martin Weiser is an independent researcher based in Seoul.

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