Twitter user gets suspended sentence for North Korea retweets

Posted on : 2012-11-22 16:38 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
Judge rules that Park Jung-geun intended to ‘aid the enemy’; Park says he was just joking around

By Park Tae-woo, staff reporter
A judge in Suwon convicted a 24-year-old photographer of violating the National Security Act by retweeting messages praising North Korea.
Judge Shin Jin-woo of the criminal division at Suwon District Court sentenced Park Jung-geun on Nov. 21 to 10 months in prison suspended for two years for the Twitter messages.
In his ruling, Shin said the court had “sufficient grounds for recognizing the text the defendant wrote or retweeted as ‘expression aiding the enemy’ as defined by the National Security Act.”
He also said the court “recognizes that he had the goal of aiding the enemy.”
Shin went on to say, “While Twitter is private by nature, a place where a person states his or her thoughts or opinions briefly within 140 characters, it cannot be restricted to a space of simple personal communication because there is no way of blocking access by an unspecified multitude, and the ripple effect is large.”
Park was originally arrested for retweeting 96 messages from the website of Uriminzokkiri, which is run by North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, and writing 133 messages aiding North Korea between December 2010 and December 2011. He was released on bail in February.
During the investigation and trial, Park claimed he had retweeted the messages to mock the North Korean regime from a critical perspective.
In a statement criticizing the ruling, MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society said, “Even apart from any question of whether the National Security Act is unconstitutional or should be abolished, this ruling is anachronistic even by the standards of rulings by the Supreme Court, which has said the prosecutors must prove the aim was to aid the enemy.”
It went on to say, “The guilty ruling against Park Jung-geun, which has become a leading example of South Korea’s social media regulations in the foreign press, is a laughing stock in the rest of the world, too.”
 
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
 
 


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