‘Is this Seoul, or Pyongyang?’: in Moon’s Korea, defectors from North face jail for propaganda fliers

For more than a decade, Park Sang-hak has flown leaflets attacking North Korea’s ruling Kim dynasty across the heavily militarised border that divides the Koreas.

Like other North Korean defectors-turned-activists in South Korea, Park believes the key to bringing down his homeland’s totalitarian system lies in arming his former compatriots with information about the outside world. After years of attracting controversy in his adopted home, Park’s activism could soon land him in jail.

Under proposals backed by South Korea’s left-leaning president Moon Jae-in, activists who send propaganda fliers and other material across the inter-Korean border would face up to three years in prison and fines of up to 30 million won (US$28,000). The Moon administration has pushed the measures as necessary to maintain positive inter-Korean relations and ensure the safety of residents at the border, where military skirmishes occasionally take place. Pyongyang has reacted furiously to the leaflet campaigns, blasting the activists responsible as “human scum”.

North Korean human rights activists and conservative politicians have condemned the clampdown as betraying the democratic South’s liberal values, including freedom of speech, and capitulating to a nuclear-armed authoritarian regime, described in a 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry as responsible for human rights abuses without “parallel in the contemporary world”.