Lee Hyo-sik is Finance Desk editor at The Korea Times. He manages finance-related stories on macroeconomics, banks, stocks, bonds, crypto etc. He is passionate about covering what's happening in Korea's financial industry and explaining it to both Korean and non-Korean readers. You can reach him at leehs@koreatimes.co.kr. Your insights and feedbacks are always appreciated.
Closure of pro-North cafes doesn’t violate human rights
By Lee Hyo-sik
The state-run human rights agency said Wednesday that the police shutdown of pro-North Korean online cafes without due legal process does not constitute a violation of human rights.
According to the National Human Rights Commission, operators and members of two Internet cafes opened on a web portal filed a complaint that their human rights were violated when the police closed the sites last December without taking due process.
They claimed that police should have received approval from the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) before shutting down the sites.
But officers asked the web portal to close the sites without going through proper channels, they argued. Citing the cafes breached the National Security Law by posting pro-North Korean material, police asked the portal to prevent Internet users from accessing the sites.
In response, cafe operators and members argued this violated their human rights.
However, the commission sided with the police, saying the closure of websites containing messages and other material promoting the communist state’s political and social systems did not violate anyone’s human rights.
Of 11 senior commission members, three agreed that freedom of expression should be restricted only through proper legal proceedings. They said shutting down the websites only by police request is tantamount to human rights violations.
But the majority of members said whether closing the sites or not is a matter of the web portal’s self-regulatory decision, adding it didn’t seem the portal was pressured by police to shut them down.