Unification Minister-Nominee Hyun Under Scrutiny
By Michael Ha
Staff Reporter
Unification Minister-designate Hyun In-taek is facing allegations he may have duplicated his academic papers in multiple journals without properly citing them.
Hyun said that he was not aware that his paper was published for a second time.
The nominee is set to undergo a confirmation hearing at the National Assembly next week.
During the 1990s, the minister-designate, who has been working as a political science professor at Korea University, reportedly published two very similar academic papers in two separate scholarly journals.
In February 1995, Hyun published a 30-page paper, titled ``The Conflict Between the United States and Japan Concerning Their Industrial and Military Technologies and Prospects for Bilateral Cooperation," in a scholarly journal called ``Policy Research." The journal was overseen by a research center run by the now-defunct Agency for National Security Planning, predecessor of the National Intelligence Service.
Hyun offered an explanation on Monday, saying that he was not aware that his paper was published a second time by the Korea Research Institute for Strategy, a Seoul-based think tank.
When scholars publish academic work in Korea, they must include references and citations to show whether their paper has been published already. It appears that the institute had published the material, which Hyun had presented at an internal seminar, he said, adding that he himself was not aware of how the material was later used. He said he had no intention of artificially inflating his publication output.
Hyun's nomination has met with sharp criticism from North Korea. Since the Lee Myung-bak administration announced the nomination, Pyongyang has been calling the move an ``outright provocation," saying that appointing a hawkish and conservative academic to the post means Seoul intends to continue its ``confrontational policy" toward the North.
North Korea observers say Professor Hyun is known as an advocate of conservative policies who seeks to tie offering aid to the North's successful denuclearization process.
Hyun, 55, has been dubbed the ``chief architect" of President Lee's North Korea policy and has been a professor at Korea University, President Lee's alma mater, since 1995. Hyun served as Lee's policy advisor during his presidential campaign and was a member of his transition team in 2007 and 2008.
He is also known as the designer of the ``Vision 3000" policy, which calls for boosting North Korea's per capita national income to $3,000 in a decade in return for Pyongyang's decision to verifiably give up its nuclear ambitions.