17
court reasoned: “Although we accept the fact the other plaintiffs were involved in investigating the bribe-
taking incident, their participation in the investigation alone cannot constitute a sufficient proof in libel
law. Further, we don’t see any evidence to establish that all the prosecutors were injured in their
reputation. Rather, given that only the two prosecutors were clearly named in the newspaper story,
ordinary readers probably understood that the two prosecutors scaled down their investigation
[illegally].”
84
At present, injunction is accepted in Korea, whether for criminal or civil libel. But injunctive
relief in libel law will be eventually rejected by Korean courts in the context of more press-sensitive and
right-to-know arguments on expression. The abolition of injunction against the press for libel will be
plausible unless injunction is justified when the libel pertains to matters of public interest and prominent
public figures, when the libel is likely to be true and to benefit the public, and when the plaintiff's
reputation is in clear and immediate danger of being irreparably damaged. If the balancing of interests in
libel injunction is in doubt, the presumption should be in favor of publication of defamatory statements in
that injunction is fundamentally antithetical to the public's right to know. This could not be more true for
political libels because prior restraint is identical to seditious libel as an effective tool of suppression for
authorities against the press.
IV. Conclusions
Political libels have emerged as a troublesome concern for the news media because an increasing
number of government officials and politically well-connected people assert their legal rights with
encouraging results. And public official and public figure plaintiffs with a political or ideological agenda
are more likely to resort to libel litigation as an effective weapon in intimidating the media--a case of the
“abuse of libel law” against the press.
It is not an overstatement to say that the Korean press feels more threat from litigious public
officials and public figures rather than from the State. Given the “essential repugnance” of seditious libel
in the guise of libel to freedom of political expression as a fundamental value underlying a participatory
democracy in Korea after 1987, Korean courts might scrutinize more searchingly the ulterior, i.e., non-
reputational, motives behind libel actions by politicians and high-ranking government officials.
The actual and perceived abuse of the restrictive libel law through various vexatious litigational
tactics in Korea can offer an apt occasion for a possible adoption of the proposition that “there is no libel
Convention