South Korea has revoked the licenses of two organizations that regularly fly balloons across the border with North Korea with propaganda brochures for “seriously hindering the government unification policy. “
Fighter registration licenses for a free North Korea and for the Kuensaem education center have been revoked, the Unification Ministry in Seoul said on Friday.
The brochures enraged the north and undermined the South’s efforts to engage with its isolated neighbor, he added.
The move is likely to spark debate about possible violations of freedom of expression in the democratic south.
The brochures, usually attached to hot air balloons or floated in bottles, criticize North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for human rights abuses and his nuclear ambitions.
Tensions also increased on the Korean peninsula and “endangered” the safety and lives of Koreans living in border cities, “the ministry added.
Revoking group operating permits does not make them illegal, but it will make it harder for them to raise money and deny them access to benefits for registered organizations.
Park Sang-hak, the leader of one of the groups, told the AFP news agency that the South Korean government “has deprived us of the most important value of democracy, which is freedom.”
Both Koreas used to regularly send brochures to the other side, but agreed to halt such propaganda activities, including speaker broadcasts along the border, in the Panmunjom Declaration signed by Kim and South President Moon Jae-in in its first summit in 2018.
Last month Pyongyang issued a series of vitrolic condemnations from South Korea over the brochures, which South-based defectors continued to send despite the agreement.
Pressure increased by blowing up an inter-Korean liaison office on his side of the border and threatening to take military action.
Seoul officials previously banned leaflet activities in the border areas and filed a police complaint against the groups.
“Instead of proposing a blanket ban on sending message and material balloons to the North, President Moon should publicly demand that North Korea respect freedom of expression and cease to censor what North Koreans can see,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch Phil Robertson said last month.
Inter-Korean relations have been frozen following the collapse of a summit between Kim and United States President Donald Trump in Vietnam last year over what the nuclear-armed North would be prepared to give up in exchange for a reduction in sanctions. .
.
