Why Criminal Libel Deserves Its Bad Reputation, and Why It Matters to the Republic of South Korea

Criminal defamation laws remain on the books in many countries including the United States and South Korea. In accordance with Korea’s Confucian culture, honor and dignity are explicitly protected by the Constitution. Although the strong historical preference of Koreans for criminal prosecution for libel has been moderated in recent years by a growth in the number of civil defamation actions, criminal libel prosecutions have resurged. The history of common law and statutory criminal libel laws and prosecutions in England and the United States lends support for the current judicial and scholarly disdain for the law of criminal libel, particularly since prosecutions are often used not to redress a serious public wrong, but to serve political and private ends. The author urges the honorable legislators of the great and progressive nation of Korea to revisit the question whether the crime of libel has become so indistinguishable from the law of civil libel in form and function as to justify its elimination, since criminal libel laws in the United States, Korea and around the world have been subject to much abuse and have an unacceptable chilling effect on the freedom of speech and the press.