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Lee Heung-gu was arrested and convicted when he was a student democratization activist

Kim Myeong-su, chief justice of South Korea’s Supreme Court, has recommended the appointment of Lee Heung-gu, a senior judge at the Busan High Court, to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Kwon Soon-il. The recommendation comes as a surprise, even within the court, considering that Lee was the first offender of South Korea’s National Security Act to become a judge. Lee’s conviction followed an arrest in 1985 for his participation in the democratization movement.

Lee was a student in the Department of Public Law at Seoul National University (SNU) when he was tried under the National Security Act for “praise and incitement of an anti-state organization” during an incident involving the SNU Democratization Promotion Committee in October 1985. Fliers that analyzed the political situation and summarized the line taken by student activists were distributed in an area rich in cram schools in what came to be called the Flag Incident, deriving from the title of the flier.

The police detained 26 individuals in this incident, including Lee, who was head of the student body society at the SNU law school as well as chair of a committee organized to resist suppression of labor activists. Lee was expelled from school immediately after his detention. A district court gave him a three-year prison sentence, which was suspended on appeal, leading to his release.

Lee was one of the individuals pardoned in a government amnesty on June 29, 1987, which cleared the way for him to re-enroll in the second semester of that year. He went on to pass Korea’s bar exam in 1990, the first student activist and National Security Act offender to do so.

“What I’m even happier about than passing the bar exam is that Korean society is now capable of embracing former National Security Act offenders and that a mood is forming that will make it possible to reassess the act itself,” Lee said during an interview with the press at the time.

“We believe that the people involved were presented as ‘left-leaning pro-Communists’ when the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP), the prosecutors, and the National Security Command intervened in the investigation in the hopes of quashing the democratization movement,” the National Police Agency said in 2005 as part of the findings of a truth and reconciliation committee. That cleared away the stigma around the SNU Democratization Promotion Committee, which had been labeled as a “pro-Communist enemy organization.”

When Lee was jailed over the Flag Incident, the judge who sentenced him to prison in January 1986 was Kwon Soon-il, the same Supreme Court justice whose term is nearing an end. Lee has been nominated to replace the very judge who convicted him 34 years ago.

Lee was appointed as a judge at the Southern Branch of the Seoul District Court in 1993 and then assigned to the Seoul District Court in 1995. He was in that position when he rejected a detention warrant for someone who’d sold a biography of (North Korean founder) Kim Il-sung, earning him a place on the ANSP’s blacklist.

Since being given a judgeship in Busan in 1997, Lee has never held another position in Seoul. While serving with the Masan Branch of the Changwon District Court, Lee accepted a retrial petition filed by family members of those who were killed in the Bodo League massacres (of communists and their suspected sympathizers) after military tribunals during the Korean War. That was the first case involving the Bodo League to be retried.

Lee has been a member of the Korean Legal Research Society and has also been involved in the International Human Rights Legal Research Society, which was formerly chaired by Chief Justice Kim Myeong-su.

Lee began his studies at the SNU law school in 1982, in the same entering class as former Justice Minister Cho Kuk. In his book “Why I Study the Law,” Cho recalled getting along well with Lee in law school and said that Lee had an “unusually keen sense of justice.”

“I’m told that [Lee] has a mild disposition and that he’s been a hard-working judge in the provinces for a long time. I’d say that Chief Justice Kim Myeong-su has recommended the person he considers the most trustworthy,” said a judge who works at a court in Seoul.

“I hope that Lee will be assessed based on his career in the provinces and his alertness to protecting minorities and guaranteeing human rights, rather than in ideological or political terms,” said a senior judge who used to work with Lee.

By Jang Pil-su, staff reporter

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