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Former President Park Geun-hye

The truth can’t be kept hidden forever. Former President Park Geun-hye’s complicity in a cultural “blacklist” was recognized by the court on Jan. 23 in an appeals hearing for former Presidential Chief of Staff Kim Ki-choon and six others. The decision reversed the ruling of the court in the first trial, which maintained that Park’s denial of support to left-wing artists and increased support to the right constituted a policy approach rather than a violation of the law.

It’s difficult to imagine things would have been run this systematically had the President not believed the culture community to have a left-wing bias. Documents from senior secretary meetings presided over by the President and Chief of Staff – discovered in a Blue House cabinet after the Moon Jae-in administration took office – show that Park received reports on and approved specific plans and implementation measures. A case in point concerned explicit measures and management plans for “problematic groups.” Yet in a talk with reporters abruptly called on Jan. 1 of last year, Park denied any involvement. “The reports gave all these huge numbers, and I didn’t know about any of it,” she claimed.

Former Senior Secretary to the President for Political Affairs Cho Yoon-sun, who was acquitted on all charges in her first trial except for perjury at a hearing, was taken into court custody after receiving a two-year sentence. Kim Ki-choon’s sentence was increased from three years in prison to four.

It’s a sign of just how significant this case is, with its violations of Constitutional principles of equality and non-discrimination. “In culture, there can be no ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’” the court said in its ruling. “The moment that a government suppresses or discriminates against culture that expresses a different view, the path to totalitarianism is opened.” This warning is a lesson from this case that we as a society must never forget.

Park’s complicity has already been largely recognized by courts in other trials to date. Samsung Electronics vice president Lee Jae-yong was convicted in connection with bribery, and Park has been deemed an accomplice in former Blue House secretary Jeong Ho-seong’s document leak case, former Culture Ministry bureau director Roh Tae-kang’s forced retirement, and now the cultural blacklist. We hope she realizes now that the best thing she can do for the sake of the nation is to appear in court herself to be tried according to the law.

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