[Editorial] NLL and spy agency

It is extremely difficult to declassify sensitive remarks a president made in secrecy. It requires the approval of two-thirds or more of the incumbent members of the 300-seat National Assembly to make public a president’s remarks, classified and stored as presidential records separately in the government’s archives.

But it looks inevitable to take the process of making public the dialogue former President Roh Moo-hyun had with his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-il during their 2007 Pyongyang summit. The opposition Democratic Party has virtually conceded to the ruling Saenuri Party’s demand that Roh’s allegedly controversial remarks on the de facto maritime demarcation line with North Korea be brought to light.

Now the question is which comes first ― a parliamentary inspection of the National Intelligence Service, which is accused of attempting to exert influence on elections, or the declassification of Roh’s alleged offer to lay no claim to the Northern Limit Line on the West Sea as the maritime demarcation line. The Democratic Party demands to the Saenuri Party that inspection precede declassification, and vice versa. Either way, however, the rival parties will leave behind a bad precedent of making public highly classified material out of partisan interest.

A dispute started when the Democratic Party demanded for the Saenuri Party to make good on their March agreement on the inspection of the spy agency, whose former director Won Sei-hoon is indicted with charges of attempting to influence the outcome of the parliamentary and presidential elections last year. The Saenuri Party, which had been dragging its feet on the issue, turned offensive last week when it claimed, citing classified material from the spy agency, that Roh offered to the North Korean leader to lay no claim to the NLL.

Rep. Moon Jae-in, Roh’s chief of staff who ran against President Park Geun-hye in the December presidential election, denied the Saenuri Party’s charges against the deceased president. He proposed to make public Roh’s recorded dialogue with Kim Jong-il as well as its written copy the spy agency is keeping. If the dialogue is to be made public indeed, it must be done in its entirety so that no part can be exploited out of context.

The public disclosure of Roh’s remarks and the parliamentary inspection into a suspicion that the spy agency and its director breached the election law in an attempt to prevent the opposition candidate from being elected president are two separate issues and must be dealt with as such.

Also at issue is whether or not the spy agency can treat the copy of the presidential records as less stringently classified public records, as it did when it permitted Saenuri-affiliated members of the Intelligence Committee access to Roh’s dialogue excerpts. The National Assembly, if necessary, will have to revise the relevant laws to define in unmistakable terms what constitutes presidential records.

At the same time, the prosecution will have to look into an allegation that the Saenuri lawmakers breached the law when they made public the classified excerpts.