Court Acquits Journalist Accused of Defaming South Korean President
By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — A Seoul court found a Japanese reporter not guilty on Thursday of defaming President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, whose government has been accused of using legal channels to try to silence news reports unfavorable to her administration.

Tatsuya Kato, a former Seoul bureau chief of Japan’s right-wing Sankei Shimbun newspaper, was on trial on the criminal charge of defaming Ms. Park with an online article published in August 2014 in which he cited what he called financial industry rumors that Ms. Park may have been having a romantic encounter with a former aide as a ferry with hundreds of passengers was sinking off southwestern South Korea.

More than 300 people, most of them teenagers, were killed in the ferry disaster in April 2014, and the high death toll was partly attributed to her government’s failure to quickly begin an efficient rescue operation. One question raised in the domestic news media at the time was whether Ms. Park was absent from her duties for seven hours on the day of the sinking.

“This is a natural verdict, and I have no other particular feeling,” Mr. Kato said in a news conference after his acquittal.

He said that he suspected his indictment was politically motivated and that it was a “questionable” practice to “indict a reporter over his article about a most public figure like the president just because they didn’t like it.”

Both Ms. Park’s office and the former aide, Chung Yoon-hoi, have vehemently denied the rumors cited in Mr. Kato’s report. They called the report maliciously defamatory because they said the reporter made little effort to verify the rumors — an argument shared by prosecutors when they indicted him in October 2014.

On Thursday, the Seoul Central District Court delivered its acquittal in a long-awaited ruling. “The article by the accused contained things inappropriate, but given that it was written with the public interest in mind, it falls within the area where the freedom of the press should be protected in a democratic society,” Judge Lee Dong-geun said.

Prosecutors have a week to appeal.

Ms. Park’s office did not immediately comment on the ruling. The acquittal came hours after the Foreign Ministry of South Korea revealed that it had asked the Justice Ministry to consider Japan’s appeal for leniency for Mr. Kato.

Mr. Kato’s legal trouble began last year when conservative South Korean civic groups, including anti-Japanese nationalist activists, sued him. His subsequent indictment came as a string of criminal investigations and lawsuits under Ms. Park led rights groups to criticize the way her government dealt with its detractors and to question how much freedom of expression was tolerated.

In a report on South Korea in November, the United Nations Human Rights Committee voiced concern about “the increasing use of criminal defamation laws to prosecute persons who criticize government action and obstruct business interests, and of the harsh sentences, including lengthy prison sentences, attached to such legal provisions.”

South Korea should “promote a culture of tolerance regarding criticism, which is essential for a functioning democracy,” the report said.

Phil Robertson, a deputy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch, said that criminal defamation laws like South Korea’s “have a chilling effect on freedom of expression, and work against the public interest by gagging critics and whistle-blowers and stifling a free press.”

“We firmly believe that journalists should not be criminalized for just doing their jobs,” he said, commenting on Mr. Kato’s case.

Throughout the trial, Mr. Kato and his lawyers pleaded innocence, saying that his article served the public’s interest by asking what the president was doing during one of the country’s biggest disasters in years. Prosecutors had requested an 18-month prison term for Mr. Kato, contending that the article was both false and defamatory.

South Korea promotes itself as one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies, a far cry from the dictatorship it once was under military-backed strongmen, including Ms. Park’s father, President Park Chung-hee. Its news outlets reflect a wide spectrum of political views, and its social media can be critical of Ms. Park.

South Koreans turn vociferous over any sign of repression of the freedom of speech.

But many South Koreans did not sympathize with Mr. Kato. His newspaper, the Sankei, is reviled here for carrying articles that residents say belittle their country and help bolster kenkan, or “hate Korea,” sentiment in Japan. The Sankei serves as a popular channel for conservative politicians in Japan who contend that Korean women recruited to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II were prostitutes.

Japan repeatedly protested Mr. Kato’s indictment, as his case became the latest spat to divide South Korea and Japan, whose relations have long been strained over historical and territorial disputes arising from Japan’s 35-year colonial rule of Korea until its defeat in World War II.

南韓顧關係？ 日記者批朴槿惠無罪

日「產經新聞」前駐首爾支局長加藤達也被控損害南韓總統朴槿惠名譽案，十七日獲判無罪，避免日韓關係再惡化。

加藤達也被南韓檢方以「毀損總統名譽」為由求刑一年六個月，日本社會譁然；一是日本媒體少有因毀謗國家領導人被依刑法起訴，一是日韓關係不佳，給人借題發揮連想。

加藤去年在產經新聞網站專欄，撰文暗示世越號船難發生時朴槿惠與男性見面，未守在青瓦台。加藤表示引用自「朝鮮日報」報導，文章要讓日本讀者了解南韓政壇情況。

十七日下午南韓法院判決無罪，裁判長李東根說，「憲法保障言論自由，本案也在言論自由範圍內。日本首相安倍晉三對此表示，樂於見到無罪判決，「期待對日韓關係有正面影響。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/world/asia/south-korea-park-geun-hye-defamation-verdict.html

2015-12-18．聯合報．A17．國際．東京記者雷光涵