In a Seoul courtroom in March this year, a prosecutor read out charges against Jeon Seung-il, a former art student, from an indictment first written in 1989. The language had not changed, nor had the charges. Thirty-seven years later, only the young defendant had grown old.
In 1989, he was 23 years old in a South Korea still shaped by decades of military rule. Jeon helped create a 77-meter-long painting depicting the country’s independence movement and democratic uprisings.
It led to his being charged and convicted under South Korea’s National Security Act with producing what the law calls “enemy-benefiting expression materials.”
Years later, the state displayed the same artwork at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and recognized him as a participant in the movement for constitutional rights. His criminal record, however, was never expunged.
Jeon’s case was finally reopened for retrial in 2026, after courts recognized that he had been unlawfully detained and coerced by intelligence agents decades earlier. The prosecution, which had opposed reopening the case, returned to the original indictment, again arguing that the painting promoted ideas “sympathetic” to North Korea.
Nearly four decades on, the legal framework remained frozen in time, refusing to match the rights-respecting reality the South Korean state now claims to celebrate. To understand how a painting can remain a crime for nearly four decades, you have to understand a war that has never ended.
Seventy-six years ago today, the Korean War began. Following the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, the peninsula had been divided at the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union administering the North and the United States the South. By 1948, two separate states had been established. Two years later, war broke out.
The fighting lasted three years; the war has lasted a lifetime. It left millions dead or wounded, reduced much of the peninsula to rubble, and divided families that to this day have never been reunited.
What was signed in July 1953 was an armistice, a military agreement to stop fighting. Not a peace treaty. The armistice still holds, but peace never came. The peninsula remains divided by a demilitarized zone, one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world.
The division not only separates territory. It severed people from one another and from the right to know how the other side lived. International human rights law protects the right to seek, receive, and impart information “regardless of frontiers.” The two Koreas have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Yet both have built legal systems that criminalize how people access, discuss, and express the ideas, information, and culture of the other. The comparison is not one of equivalence. In both countries, however, the same unresolved conflict serves as justification for suppressing the same fundamental right.
In South Korea, the 1948 National Security Act criminalizes praising, encouraging, or siding with “anti-state organizations”, broadly defined in law as groups that claim governmental authority or seek to overthrow the state.
In practice, South Korean prosecutors and courts have applied this above all to one entity: North Korea. The effect reaches beyond the courtroom. Any expression that can be framed as sympathetic to North Korea risks attracting the label “ppalgaengi,” a slur meaning “red,” or “jongbuk,” literally “following the North,” a derogatory label branding someone as subservient to the enemy.
These are not merely words. They are social sentences that can end a career, destroy a reputation, and follow a person for life. The damaging effect of a law like the National Security Act is not only what it does to the people it prosecutes. It is also what it does to everyone else. The law prosecutes a few. The fear it generates silences the rest.
In December 2024, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, citing “pro-North anti-state forces.”
Although the declaration was overturned by parliament within hours and Yoon was eventually removed from office, the crisis exposed a chilling continuity. The same language once used to prosecute an art student for a painting was invoked to justify an attempt to shut down the National Assembly.
In North Korea, the same logic runs in the other direction, but with far harsher consequences. A 2020 law describes South Korean media as “rotten ideology,” punishing viewing it with lengthy prison terms and potentially with death for its distribution.
A 2023 law extends this to South Korean speech patterns and vocabulary. Yet people Amnesty International has interviewed who left even before these laws were enacted described a curiosity that no law could eliminate.
They sought out forbidden South Korean dramas and music, knowing the risks. What drew them was not politics, but the depiction of ordinary life that the state’s narrative never acknowledged. The more it was forbidden, the more they wanted it.
The UNESCO Constitution, drafted in 1945, warned that “ignorance of each other’s ways and lives” breeds “suspicion and mistrust” that “have all too often broken into war.” On the Korean Peninsula, both governments maintain this ignorance by law.
Neither system has escaped scrutiny. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has condemned North Korea’s laws before the Security Council, warning that punishing people for viewing or sharing foreign media violates the right to freedom of expression. The UN Human Rights Office has since reported a sharp escalation in this repression.
Pyongyang has dismissed these findings, defending its laws as sovereign measures. Similarly, since 1992, the UN Human Rights Committee has repeatedly told South Korea that its law fails the strict requirements of international human rights law, most recently in 2023. Each time, Seoul has used the “northern threat” to justify the status quo, and no reform has followed.
Seven decades after the fighting stopped, most Koreans have never seen a face from across the border. But the search for connection that both governments have spent decades trying to criminalize reveals something neither system can afford to admit: the desire to know the other Korea endures, even under a legal architecture built to enforce silence.
The ICCPR envisions “free human beings enjoying freedom from fear.” On the Korean Peninsula, this vision has been sacrificed to a war that stopped seven decades ago but was never allowed to end.
There has not yet been a verdict in art student Jeon’s retrial. But it is set to continue against the backdrop of an unending war that demands an unending enemy: one that cannot be freely known, openly discussed, or fully understood.
The cost is measured not only in the lives lost during the fighting, but in a fear inherited across generations, in the conversations that never happened, in the questions never asked, and in the futures that became harder to imagine.
Boram Jang is East Asia researcher at Amnesty International.
