Many people have heard that South Korea is jokingly called the "Republic of Samsung" because even the president of the Samsung Group has to pay tribute to a few points. However, chaebols, including the president of Samsung, are afraid of being interviewed by prosecutors in person, raiding homes, and even arresting and prosecuting. Therefore, South Korea is also known as the "procuratorial republic", prosecutors are not only the embodiment of justice in Most of the Korean film and television dramas, but also recently led a team to search the Blue House in the "Choi Soon-sil Incident" (although they could not enter the door), and set up a special inspection team to investigate President Park Geun-hye, which has attracted the world's attention. But South Korean prosecutors have also suffered setbacks in the past two years.
On February 12 last year, I saw a book in the Sansodo Bookstore in Jimbocho, Tokyo, Japan, titled "Winning the Lawsuit in Korea: My 500-Day War with the Park Geun-hye Regime" (なぜ私は韓国に勝てたか: Park Geun-hye's political struggle. Although tatsuya Kato was roughly aware of the author's entanglement with the South Korean government, he did not expect Park Geun-hye to step down, so he did not pay much attention to the urgent publication of the book (the author was acquitted on December 17, 2015, and the book was published on February 2, 2016). Until recently, I bought a nearly brand new second-hand book, read and looked back at the current situation in South Korea in the past year, and found that the author could be said to have mistakenly hit the second car.
Tatsuya Kato, who is also the former director of the Seoul bureau of Japan's Sankei Shimbun in South Korea, said at the tenth trial that he began to contact Koreans in the 2002 World Cup, and in 2004 the newspaper sent him to Yonsei University in South Korea to study Korean, and later two of his Korean assistants at the Seoul branch were very enthusiastic, honest and hardworking, and the Korean civil servants and their families interviewed were friendly. According to the author's resume, he became a special correspondent in Seoul in November 2010 and became bureau chief a year later.
On April 16, 2014, the South Korean passenger ship Sewol sank, and more than 300 students on board disappeared or died. South Korea's largest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, published an article on July 18 by reporter Choe Pu-sik, mentioning that Park Geun-hye had been missing for seven hours after the "Sewol" incident, and even Kim Ki-chun, the secretary general of the Blue House, did not know, and then quoted rumors in the market that President Park may have a "secret meeting" with people that day (coincidentally, the Korean drama "Secret Meeting" was broadcast before and after the "Sewol" accident - the author's note), and then named Chung Yun-hui, the secretary office chief during Park's seven years as a member of parliament. Zheng was divorced at the time (his ex-wife was choi Soon-sil, who was later known to the world).
On August 3, Kato shimbun also published a "Tracking from Seoul" column in the Sankei Shimbun entitled "Who is President Park Geun-hye Meeting with on the Day the (Sewol) Passenger Ship Sank?" It quotes the above-mentioned Chosun Ilbo article, but it is worth noting that it mentions President Park's words such as "secret thread" and "relationship between men and women", and also points out that this is an "urban legend". The next day, the article was translated into Korean by the South Korean media, and Kato Tatsuya's trouble came: on August 5, the Blue House called and said that it would pursue the civil and criminal responsibility of the author; on the 6th, the Blue House issued a special express mail for accountability, and some civil society groups also filed a complaint with the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office accusing Kato Tatsuya of "damaging President Park's reputation" and was accepted; on the 7th, the chief propaganda secretary of the Blue House confirmed the accountability statement, and the procuratorate also made measures against Katoda for leaving South Korea. The Public Prosecutor's Office then invited Tatsuya Kato on three occasions to explain that on October 8, he was charged with "defamation" under the South Korean Act on the Promotion of Information and Communication Network Utilization and Information Protection (hereinafter referred to as the "Information and Communication Network Law").
At this point, readers may wonder: Since Tatsuya Kato's article is about the reputations of Both Park Geun-hye and Jung Yun-hui, why is it not that they themselves filed the complaint but that the prosecutor, who is the representative of state power, came forward? Kato also mentions in the book that the crime of defamation in South Korea is sued by a third party, but does not explain the legal basis. I searched the Korean Attorney's Office Act, which contains six of the duties of prosecutors, but the Chinese network generally translates the fifth duty as "to perform civil proceedings, proceedings and exercise of command and supervision of the State as a party or participant", whereas the original text of article 4, paragraph 5, of the Act is "국가를 당사자 또는 참가인으로 는 소송과 행정소송 수행 또는 그 수행에 관한 지휘··감독", meaning "to perform a lawsuit in which the State is a party or participant, Administrative proceedings and the exercise of command and supervision over that execution", where "proceedings involving the State as a party or participant" are clearly not civil and criminal proceedings.
So, what exactly is the lawsuit? Article 4 of the Law explains what a "state litigation" is: the Minister of Justice files a state lawsuit and an administrative lawsuit in matters that have a major bearing on the interests of the state or the public good, and after obtaining the permission of the court, they may appoint the staff of the Ministry of Justice, the prosecutor or the public interest counsel to submit a litigation opinion.
Specific to the Kato Tatsuya case, the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office filed a lawsuit against Kato with the Seoul Central District Court, holding that his article was a blatant fabrication of facts and malicious scandals on the basis of the so-called relationship between President Park and the issue of the relationship between men and women, constituting the crime of defamation. From the first hearing of the case on November 27, 2014, to the court's judgment on December 17, 2015, a total of 11 hearings were held. During this period, the prosecution summoned Jeong Yun-hye and other witnesses to testify in court, Ande denied seeing Park Geun-hye on the day of the incident; the defendant applied to testify with fellow American and Japanese journalists in Seoul, South Korea, among which Donald Kirk (then seventy-seven), a veteran journalist who had covered the Gwangju incident, believed that the South Korean government had overreacted to the lawsuit and mentioned the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; Yuichi Ueda, director of the Seoul bureau of West Japan News, pointed out that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's itinerary is made public on a minute-by-minute basis.
In the sixth trial, Choe Phu-sik, a reporter for Chosun Ilbo, was unable to testify on a business trip to Japan and other places, and later claimed that his absence was due to "media ethics to protect sources." Why did no one in South Korea report or prosecute Choe, the chosun Ilbo reporter who first reported on the "secret meeting"? Park Mou, the head of the civil society group that denounced Tatsuya Kato, said that Choi's article gave advice to President Park from the perspective of national government operations, while Kato's report was a malicious fabrication of facts (see the second trial record). Another group leader said kato's article had damaged the national character of the Republic of Korea and caused confusion among the country; he believed that the same issue was reported by the Chosun Ilbo, like a noisy quarrel between husband and wife, and it was not the turn of neighbors to intervene, and domestic problems should be resolved domestically (see the record of the third trial).
History of the Republic of Korea
However, the above argument is clearly a double standard. Tatsuya Kato's articles are mainly aimed at Japanese readers, and if they had not been translated and spread by the Korean online media after they were retitled and spread, not many Koreans would have noticed at all. Moreover, as the most influential media in South Korea, even the Blue House and the prosecutors were afraid of three points: Park Geun-hye was elected president because the staff of the National Intelligence Agency posted online posts to slander the interests of her opponents when she sat in the general election; but Prosecutor General Choi Dong-wook still did not spare the investigation of the incident after Park came to power, and even the chief justice as his superior, Kwan, blocked back, and as a result, the Blue House released materials to the Chosun Ilbo, exposing that Choi had an illegitimate child, and he had to step down (see Kim Kwang-hee's "History of the Republic of Korea," Social Science Literature Publishing House, October 2014). Prosecutors certainly know how powerful chosun Ilbo is, not to mention that they also have to look at the president's face, which is not only Kato's personal opinion (P61-64), Kim Yong-cheol, who was the legal director of the secretary office of the president of the Samsung Group (later changed to the Structural Adjustment Headquarters), was a former prosecutor, and he revealed in the book "Inside Samsung" that in 1995, then-President Kim Yong-sam announced that he would "correct history" and instructed to re-investigate the "Double Twelve Purge Coup Case" of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo. The case was originally dismissed by the Ministry of Public Security of the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office as "innocent of a successful coup", and then re-prosecuted and arrested the two based on the same information, when a prosecutor said: "We are dogs, and the owner bites when he tells us to bite, and when he tells us to let go." Kim Yong-cheol believes that compared with Japanese prosecutors, South Korean prosecutors rarely search those in power, and only chase and beat those who have lost power.
"Samsung Insider"
At the tenth trial on October 19, 2015, prosecutors asked the court to sentence defendant Tatsuya Kato to one year and six months in prison. Later, during the Japan-South Korea summit, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe mentioned the case, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea. The verdict was postponed, and on November 19, the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutor's Office announced that it was indicted against Park Yu-ho, author of "The Comfort Women of the Empire," for defamation. Park Yu-ho, a professor at Sejong University, was an academic book for the general public, but because of the mention of a comfort woman who said that she was not forcibly taken by the Japanese army before her death, about ten comfort women filed a criminal lawsuit against "harming reputation" in 2014, while the prosecutor believed that more than thirty descriptions in the book were "false content, infringing on the victim's personality and reputation rights, which has exceeded the scope of academic freedom." On December 17, 2015, the Seoul Central District Court acquitted Tatsuya Kato, stating that "the whereabouts of the president on the day of the Sinking of the Sewol are within the scope of public concern and should therefore be protected from free speech," and that although Tatsuya Kato's column was "undoubtedly fabricated," "the main purpose of writing the report was to convey the political and social situation in South Korea." Judging from the ubiquitous assessment of the political situation in this report, it is difficult to judge that he has defamation intentions for the reputation of 'individual' rather than 'president'". Five days later, prosecutors waived the counter-appeal. The five-hundred-day war with Park Geun-hye's regime ended in the victory of journalist Tatsuya Kato.
Exactly one year after Katoda was acquitted, the Seoul Eastern District Attorney General's Office demanded a three-year sentence for Park, and before and after that, sixty-eight writers and scholars, including Japan's Kenzaburo Oe, the American Chomsky, and Bruce Cummins, signed letters of protest. On January 25 of this year, the court said that "even if there is some manifestation of reputational damage to Japanese comfort women as a whole, it is difficult to specifically prosecute people as victims." Because of the damage to his reputation, it is difficult to believe that the prosecutors were harmed by social evaluation", announced Park Yu-ho's innocence.
So far, the South Korean prosecutor has filed a national prosecution on the grounds of national interest and public welfare, and has lost two consecutive battles.