The ruling Democratic Party of Korea, which holds a wide majority in the National Assembly, is rushing to pass a number of controversial bills.
The party convened plenary sessions of the National Assembly’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee and its Education Committee on Thursday to handle bills to revise laws on press arbitration and private schools.
Earlier in the day, the party unilaterally passed a carbon neutrality bill in the Environment and Labor Committee. The bill revised upward the country’s emissions reduction target for 2030, to 35 percent or more of 2018 levels.
Businesses, particularly manufacturers, complained that the target was too drastic but the party ignored them.
The party plans to push the bills through the Assembly’s plenary session on Aug. 25.
Furthermore, the Democratic Party has come under fire from press groups at home and abroad over the press bill, which if it passes will provide for punitive damages of up to five times the actual damages victims incur due to false or fabricated media reports. Expressing strong concern that the bill would severely curtail freedom of speech, critics demanded that it be scrapped.
But the party will likely ignore the concerns and push it through. What matters to the party is the hard-line supporters who will cast ballots for its presidential candidate. They are said to have insisted on the passage of the press bill.
The party says the bill is designed to prevent the spread of false information. But in reality, it would have the inevitable result of suppressing reports critical of those in power.
If more and more lawsuits go ahead, with plaintiffs seeking punitive damages to recoup their losses fivefold, news media will be discouraged from digging into allegations involving powerful figures.
When the party proposed the bill, it vowed to put the brakes on fake news -- yet individual YouTubers and other social media users were excluded as its targets, even though social media is a hotbed of fake news.
The private school bill forces private schools to entrust the written tests that determine which teachers are hired to municipal or provincial education superintendents.
To justify the bill, the party cites past employment irregularities at some private schools. But stripping schools of the right to select their own employees is an excessive and authoritarian response. Critics question whether the current regime seeks to fill private schools with teachers who cater to education superintendents, most of whom belong to the ruling party. Private schools are not public schools. Employment autonomy matters to private schools very much. The party must not strip them of that right.
By rushing to pass these bills unilaterally, the ruling party has dispensed with a tradition of parliamentary democracy that values legislative procedures and bipartisan consultations.
The main opposition People Power Party, media groups and businesses opposed the bills, but the Democratic Party and allies such as the minor Open Minju Party are pushing them through unilaterally on the back of their huge majority of about 180 seats in the 300-seat parliament, just as they pushed other bills through in 2020 after the ruling party swept the general elections.
It undermined parliamentary democracy in 2019 when it changed the election law in its own favor, eliminating a rule that was important to democracy, through deals with minor opposition parties but without compromise with the main opposition party. It shook the country’s criminal justice system by pushing through a bill to create the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials, but the office’s ability to investigate is far below expectations. Soon after winning the general elections in April last year, the party passed three housing bills without discussing them with opposition parties. The result was a severe shortage of “jeonse” (no rent, deposit only) homes. It pushed through three economy-related bills that businesses strongly opposed. It even enacted a law to ban the flying of propaganda leaflets into North Korea, soon after Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, told the South to do something about the leafleting.
The party is rushing to pass bills unilaterally. If the press bill passes, the party will shout for joy. But in the long term, hiding irregularities will erode the country as well as the regime. Then people will turn their backs, and the bills will boomerang back onto the party.
By Korea Herald (
koreaherald@heraldcorp.com)
