South Korea Disbands Party Sympathetic to North

South Korea Disbands Party Sympathetic to North

                                                            By CHOE SANG-HUNDEC. 19, 2014

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In the first verdict of its kind, the Constitutional Court of South Korea on Friday ordered the dissolution of a small leftist party accused of supporting North Korea at the cost of the South’s national security and in violation of its Constitution.

The court also ordered all of the party’s five lawmakers stripped of their parliamentary seats.

The three-year-old United Progressive Party “aimed at using violent means to overthrow our free democratic system” and “ultimately establishing a North Korean-style socialist system,” the nine-member court said in its nationally televised ruling.

The ruling marked a political victory for President Park Geun-hye and her National Intelligence Service and Justice Ministry, which filed a lawsuit in November 2013 asking the Constitutional Court to disband the party. The party’s estimated 100,000 members have been among the most vocal critics of Ms. Park, often calling her a reincarnation of her father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee, who ruled the country with an iron fist from 1961 to 1979.

With only five seats, the party is a minor force in the 300-member National Assembly. But the move to dissolve it has incited an intensely watched yearlong legal battle over the limits to the freedom of political activities in South Korea.

No political party in democratized South Korea had been shut down by the government or a court decision since Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s dictatorial founding president, forced the closure of a leftist party in 1958. By law, the Constitutional Court can disband a political party if six or more of its nine justices agree that the party “violated the basic democratic order.” In its ruling on Friday, the court said that all but one of its justices agreed on the dissolution of the party.

The verdict took effect immediately. By law, all the assets of the party will be confiscated by the government. The country’s national election commission said that new elections would take place in April to fill seats vacated by the ruling on Friday.

Ms. Park’s office had no immediate comment on the verdict.

Outside the courthouse, conservative activists cheered at the news, waving national flags. Park Dae-chool, a spokesman for Ms. Park’s governing Saenuri Party, hailed the verdict as “a stern judgment against those who deny the Republic of Korea” and “a victory for free democracy.” The Republic of Korea is the official name of South Korea.

“Today is the day when democracy in South Korea is pronounced dead,” Lee Jung-hee, head of the United Progressive Party, said during a rally of party members outside the courthouse. Ms. Lee accused the Constitutional Court of “opening the door for totalitarianism.” Some party members wept.

The main opposition party, the New Politics Alliance for Democracy, issued a statement saying that although it opposed the United Progressive Party’s policies, it also opposed the fate of a political party being decided by a court ruling, rather than through elections.

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Ms. Park took office in February last year amid heightened tensions with North Korea. The North launched a long-range rocket in December 2012 and conducted its third nuclear test two weeks before her inauguration.

While promising strong retaliation against any further North Korean provocation, her government moved against domestic politicians accused of “following North Korea.” It arrested the lawmaker Lee Seok-ki and a few other key members of the United Progressive Party on highly unusual charges of treason in September last year. It then filed a lawsuit to disband their party.

Mr. Lee and the others were sentenced to two to nine years in prison by an appeals court in August on charges of bringing together 130 followers in May last year and calling for an armed rebellion against the South Korean government in the event of war on the divided Korean Peninsula. Mr. Lee’s lawyers have denied the charges. The Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on his case in January.

South Korea remained technically at war with North Korea after the three-year Korean War ended in 1953 in a truce, not with a peace treaty. It blocks access to North Korean websites and people are still arrested for resending Twitter posts of North Korean propaganda materials.

The United Progressive Party’s platform calls for “rectifying our nation’s shameful history, tainted by imperialist invasions, the national divide, military dictatorship, the tyranny and plunder of transnational monopoly capital” and giant family-controlled business conglomerates. The party wants to end the American military presence, dismantle South Korea’s “subordinate alliance with the United States” and unify the North and the South.