[Editorial] Absurd articles

A hole in the articles of South Korea's Criminal Act and Military Criminal Act regarding espionage crime came into view after a civilian employee of the Korea Defense Intelligence Command was arrested for leaking classified data on many of its overseas undercover agents.

Under Korea's military penal code, both a person who spies for the enemy and a person who aids and abets a spy for the enemy shall be sentenced to death and life imprisonment. The "enemy" here is limited to North Korea. So a person who spies for another country or hands over state secrets to a foreign national who is not a North Korean cannot be charged with espionage.

The Criminal Act stipulates that a person who spies for an enemy country or who aids and abets a spy for an enemy country shall be sentenced to death, life in prison or more than seven years in prison. Likewise, "an enemy country" here means only North Korea.

The employee in question was detained on July 30. In requesting an arrest warrant, military prosecutors charged the employee not for espionage but for leaking a military secret, a crime carrying imprisonment of 10 years or less, under the Military Criminal Act.

Military investigators found that the civilian worker handed over military secrets to a Chinese national of Korean ethnicity, not to a North Korean agent. They have not discovered any connection between the worker and North Korea so far.

If military prosecutors fail to prove that the worker received instructions from North Korea, or that at the time of turning over secrets to the Chinese national, the employee was aware of the latter being connected to North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau intelligence agency, it will be hard to charge the employee with the crime of espionage.

The employee's leak of secrets is a grave issue. The exposure of undercover agents spying abroad with their identities disguised endangered them as well as the sources who offered them information secretly. The agents were reportedly rushed back home to South Korea. They are said to have lost contact with their sources. Intelligence networks built up for decades through connections with sources were practically broken up.

It is likely that the Chinese national acted on instructions from a North Korean intelligence agency. It is absurd not to be able to charge the civilian employee with the crime of espionage amid the severity of the secret leak, just because secrets were not handed over to a North Korean. This hole in the Criminal and Military Criminal Acts must be fixed at once.

Under the current articles, it is hard to punish those who leak not only military secrets but also strategically important technologies on espionage charges. In most countries, the leak of state secrets is punished as espionage.

During the previous National Assembly session, the ruling and opposition parties proposed bills to revise espionage-related articles. Han Dong-hoon, leader of the ruling People Power Party, argued that the bills had not been passed because the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea put the brakes on them during the stage of bill deliberation.

The Democratic Party disputed this claim, arguing that the bill deliberation did not proceed because of differences between the Justice Ministry and the National Court Administration over related issues.

It is futile for the rival parties to blame each other now over which party is responsible for the failure to revise the laws. On the whole, the ruling and opposition parties agree on the necessity of expanding the scope of criminal espionage. There is no reason for them to drag their feet in revising the laws.

In 2020, the then-ruling Democratic Party unilaterally passed a bill to deprive the National Intelligence Service of its right to investigate domestic and communist espionage activities and to transfer that authority to the police.

Recently, the party went even further, with some lawmakers proposing a bill to preclude the agency from investigation activities such as accessing documents and demanding data. This is as good as attempting to incapacitate the agency.

Weakening a country's intelligence abilities is tantamount to a self-injury to national security. Issues regarding espionage articles must be fixed, and the intelligence agency should be returned to normalcy.