5
Erik Bierbauer noted recently that “there has been a growing trend against [criminal] defamation actions”
in Korea during the last 20 years.
23
It is too early to tell, however, whether defamation will be abolished
as a criminal matter soon. As ARTICLE 19, the International Centre Against Censorship in London,
suggested in July 1999 that the Korean government review its criminal libel law to prevent it from being
used as “tools of harassment and intimidation.”
24
The standard for libel defense for the press in Korea has been relaxed over the 15 years. That is,
although the contents of a story published in a newspaper are factually false, the newspaper cannot be
held liable for defamation if there is a considerable ground to believe the story to be true, and the story
relates to a matter of public interest only.
25
But the press-sensitive libel defense has rarely been useful
when the media are sued by public officials or public figures. A case in point was the libel case of
January 1996, when Kim Hyon-chol, the son of President Kim Young Sam, sued Han-kyoreh Shinmun
for a defamatory story. The Seoul District Court held that there was no “objective” proof of Kim Hyon-
chol’s alleged receiving of illegal political donations from a source quoted in the Han-kyoreh article.
Kim was awarded 400 million won (US$400,000), the largest damages award in the history of Korean
libel law.
26
Even more alarming about public-official libels in Korea is courts’ willingness to allow members
of a governmental group to sue individually even though the defamatory content is directed against the
entire group. In February 2000, for example, 12 prosecutors at the Seoul District Prosecutors Office
successfully sued the Chosun Daily and an editorial writer for libel, claiming that the newspaper’s
editorial had suspected the prosecutors of an illegality of tapping the cellular phone conversations
between two key figures involved in a “strike-rigging” scandal. The Seoul District Court handed down a
judgment of 180 million won (US$180,000) to the plaintiffs. The court also ordered the daily to publish a
retraction of the defamatory editorial as a suitable measure for the plaintiffs to recover from their
reputational damage under the Civil Code.
27
The Seoul court rejected the Chosun Daily’s assertion that the paper had a “substantial reason”
for believing the editorial pertinent to the plaintiffs. The court reasoned that the defendant newspaper did
not verify relevant facts before publishing the challenged editorial, while knowing mistakenly that the
related stories in Chosun Daily and other newspapers were truthful.
28
The Seoul High Court affirmed the
trial court’s judgment.
29
Convention