Vol. 78/No. 45      December 15, 2014

The move to ban the party — which holds five seats in the 300 member National Assembly — goes hand in hand with an ongoing attempt to take away legal recognition of the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union.

“The Unified Progressive Party is a cancer that wants to destroy the Republic of Korea from within,” Minister of Justice Hwang Kyo-ahn told the Constitutional Court. Under South Korean law, the court has the final say on whether the party is allowed to function legally.

The opposition party’s call for “progressive democracy,” the government asserted, is “the first stage in achieving North Korean-style socialism.”

In its brief to the court, the Ministry of Justice listed more than half a dozen protest movements over the last 15 years that it claimed were manipulated by agents of the North Korean government. Among them: protests against a U.S. bombing range in Maehyang Village in 2000; protests after two middle school students were crushed to death by a U.S. military armored vehicle in 2002; protests in 2005 and 2006 against the U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek; calls in 2005 to tear down a statue of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, head of the U.S. occupation force in Korea after World War II; and opposition to the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement in 2006, the daily Hankyoreh wrote in September.

“The very act of presenting a difference of political opinion as ‘hostile actions’ is what undermines democracy,” Unified Progressive Party Chairwoman Lee Jung-hee told the court, answering government charges.

Government officials asked the court to outlaw the opposition party in November 2013, after arresting Rep. Lee Seok-ki and other party members, charging them with seditious conspiracy — plotting an insurrection — and violation of the National Security Law, which makes it illegal to sympathize with “anti-state groups.” The case against Lee was based on two speeches he gave in May 2013 and testimony by a government informant who claimed that Lee set up a secret Revolutionary Organization.

Inaccurate transcripts of Lee’s speeches submitted by the government included distortions of what he said. According to Gregory Elich, writing in CounterPunch, the government later corrected the transcripts in 272 places. For example, the transcript first said that Lee called for “carrying out holy war.” The corrected version changed that to “carrying out promotion.”

In February this year, South Korean Judge Kim Jung-woon found Lee and six other members of the Unified Progressive Party guilty of the two main charges. Lee was sentenced to 12 years in prison plus an additional 10-year ban on running for office.

In August the ninth criminal division of the Seoul High Court overturned the conspiracy charge of plotting an insurrection but upheld the conviction of incitement and violation of the National Security Law, reducing Lee’s sentence to nine years. Judge Lee Min-geol said that he had “suspicions” that the Revolutionary Organization was an invention of the prosecution. The case will now go to the Supreme Court.

There have been some demonstrations against government persecution of Lee Seok-ki and the Unified Progressive Party, but other opposition parties and most trade union officials have been silent.

“This must change,” In Jae-geun, a National Assembly member from the New Politics Alliance for Democracy, the main bourgeois opposition party, said at a “Roundtable to Guard Democracy and Oppose the Forced Dissolution of the Unified Progressive Party,” held in Seoul Nov. 6. “We cannot allow further retreat of democracy.”

Meanwhile, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union has held off government attempts to close down the union. In October 2013 the labor ministry stripped the union of its legal status for violating anti-union laws by allowing fired teachers to remain in the union.

The Seoul High Court Sept. 19 extended an injunction preventing the government from outlawing the union for the time being.  
 
 
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