South Korea Steps Up Porn Crusade

Korean authorities are cracking down on Internet porn.

The world's most wired country is raiding cyberspace's red-light district in a campaign pitting Confucian morals against modern technology. Since January, the main prosecutor's office in Seoul has issued arrest warrants under South Korea's telecommunications law for about 100 people charged with spreading obscene material, a crime carrying penalties of up to a year in jail or a nearly $10,000 fine. .... Authorities "can't really control it because it's the Internet, it's impossible," said Lee, 28, a worker at the Red Box adult Internet cafe, who gave only his last name. "We should have the freedom to see whatever we want."

Doesn't Korea have a constitution? Doesn't that constitution contain free-speech guarantees? It doesn't amount to a hill of beans; the language is so vague that nannies and prudes can apply the law any way they like. That's because the highest law of the land

...contains the caveat that such [free] expression should neither "violate the honor or rights of other persons nor undermine public morals or social ethics." The law doesn't define obscenity, but Jun Ji-yun, a law professor at Seoul's Yonsei University, said it was understood to be something that "brings sexual disgrace to people."

By all appearances, Justice Potter Stewart is alive and well and living in Korea.

Comments

[John Thacker]

It's a bad idea, but not, you know, unusual among countries. In Norway hardcore pornography (defined as known when seen) is illegal to sell and illegal on cable TV. (But legal on satellite.) And of course Japan's famously restrictive laws (no public hair, nipples, genitalia) were recently somewhat loosened. (Though at the same law laws about child pornography were strengthened.)

Very, very few countries have Consitutions and Supreme Courts which have said that the government may not make a law restricting pornography or make it illegal. A reasonable number have chosen to not restrict porn, it is true, but that's different from having a constitutional guarantee.