Was the Detention of the “Statue of Peace Abolition” Activist Triggered by President Lee’s Remarks?

[Choice Times=Jeong-Seok Han, Political Commentator]

The court has dismissed the detention review petition filed by Kim Byung-heon (68), head of the Citizens’ Action for the Abolition of the Comfort Women Act.

Earlier, the court had issued an arrest warrant against Kim on charges including defamation of the deceased, citing concerns that he might flee. This time, in reviewing the legality of that detention, the court rejected his request, saying there was “no reason” to overturn it.

To begin with, Kim Byung-heon’s description of the comfort women as “prostitutes” is not, in my view, even a matter that should be fought over under the banner of freedom of expression.

At the time, the termcomfort womenwas a common noun referring to women engaged in prostitution, and under Japanese colonial rule prostitution was legal under a licensing system. Therefore, military comfort women, too, were by definition a form of state-regulated prostitution.

President Lee Jae-myung’s remark — “How can it make sense to call sex slaves prostitutes?” — is not only plainly erroneous, but also runs counter to the Japanese government’s own stated position that the term “sex slaves” should not be used in reference to comfort women.

The commonly repeated claim that even recruitment by persuasion or fraud — rather than forcible abduction — should be considered “coercion” is, in legal terms, highly problematic. Unless there is evidence that the perpetrators of trafficking or abduction were Japanese officials or military personnel, one cannot recklessly attribute such acts to the Japanese state or army.

To put it differently, if someone were to claim that Korean soldiers in Vietnam committed mass rape against village women, that claim would remain just that — a claim — unless it were officially investigated. The same applies to the truth of the comfort women issue. Until properly investigated, it remains a matter of allegation.

The testimonies of comfort women survivors should, of course, be examined. But no institution has ever officially and comprehensively investigated those claims. People often cite U.S. military reports, but those documents merely recorded answers obtained through field interviews.

The comfort women who were captured by the U.S. military would naturally have insisted that they were not collaborators with the Japanese military, but victims. That is common sense. Yet the U.S. military did not investigate those assertions in depth.

Kim Byung-heon’s protest in front of a girls’ school — where he shouted toward the school, “Are you teaching prostitution?” — was, in his view, a protest against the installation of a comfort women statue on school grounds and against what he sees as the teaching of falsehoods about comfort women.

Such a protest, therefore, cannot amount to defamation or insult based on false facts about comfort women. For such a crime to be established, it would first have to be legally proven that the comfort women system was not part of a prostitution system, and that the victim narratives being advanced have been formally verified.

For the courts to abandon legal reasoning and instead rule based on political pressure simply because the president made a single statement founded on error — that would be a disgrace.

The judges responsible for such decisions, in my view, should be prepared to face accountability for distorting the law.

#FreedomOfExpression #ComfortWomenDebate #JudicialControversy