11
wrote. “In 2002, in their decisions the Supreme Court and the Higher Courts revealed a momentous
change in their positions on the public figure concept.... The new decisional criteria adopted by those
courts seem to be based on the Constitutional Court’s interpretational standards for freedom of the
press.”
58
Korea Forum v. Lawyers for a Democratic Society
59
is a good illustration. This 2002 media libel
case of the Supreme Court started when Korea Forum, a conservative opinion journal, criticized the
Lawyers for a Democratic Society, several civic organizations, and labor unions for their “class struggle”
in advancing the interests of the Chosun Labor Party of North Korea while denying the existence of South
Korea.
60
The Seoul District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the Seoul High Court upheld the
ruling, on the ground that “there was no proof that the articles challenged in this case were truthful and
that the defendants had a probable reason for believing them to be true.”
61
The Supreme Court affirmed in part and reversed in part the decision of the Seoul High Court.
The Supreme Court, quoting from the 1999 opinion of the Constitutional Court, stated: “In
drawing the boundaries between freedom of speech and the press and reputation, it should be kept in mind
that there is a difference between whether the defamatory statement relates to a person in a private way or
it related to him in a public way.”
62
The Supreme Court also took special note of the political content of
the statement as a crucial element in balancing press freedom against reputational interests:
When the defamatory statement concerns the political ideology of a public figure, it takes
on a special significance. The larger the public figure’s national and social influence, the
more the political ideology of the public figure will affect the destiny of the Nation.
Accordingly, the public figure’s political ideology should be disclosed and verified far
more thoroughly. The doubts and suspicions surrounding the public figure’s political
ideology should be subject to wide-ranging questioning and to public debates insofar as
there’s a probable ground for them. Democracy requires that the act of raising questions
about the ideology should not be prohibited in the name of protecting reputation, and the
ideology should be rejected through a competitive process of pro and con debates,
although accurate arguments and official judgments have yet to be rendered on the
political ideology.
63
The Supreme Court argued that the inherent nature of a political ideology itself makes
ascertainment of a particular individual’s or organization’s ideology “all but impossible.” Thus, the
ordinary requirement of strict proof in libel litigation is not warranted when there is a need to determine
whether doubts about, or subjective evaluations of, the political ideology are compatible with truth or
whether there was a probable ground for believing the doubts or evaluations. Accordingly, the burden of
Convention