Original Korean article is here.
32-year old Mrs. Kim, who lives in Gwangju, was very upset on Children’s Day. She was in a car accident with her Canadian husband and their five-month old child and the other driver insulted her husband by calling him a 양놈 and that he wished all 양놈 would die, then insulted their child for being mixed-race, then said she and her child should die also.
With a husband who had already applied for Korean permanent residency, calls their child by a Korean name and wishes to continue living in Korea, Mrs. Kim wants to take a legal response but “there is no law punishing racially discriminatory language” so it could only be prosecuted as criminal insult (모욕죄). Mrs. Kim said, “So can we guarantee that something similar won’t happen in the future… I hope that people recognize the need for a law that will reduce the racial discrimination that multicultural children experience growing up.”
According to Ministry of Justice (법무부) statistics, on June 30, 2010 there were 1,208,544 legally resident foreigners, the first time ever that there were more than 1.2 million, and as of last year 80,832 had taken Korean citizenship. But there remains opposition to this situation and legal changes are necessary. The National Human Rights Commission law (국가인권위원회법) bans hiring discrimination on the basis of national origin, ethnic origin, or race, but there is no law making racially discriminatory language a crime and it can be prosecuted only as criminal insult or defamation (명예훼손죄).
In other cases of judicial rulings on racially discriminatory language, last year the Bucheon courts in Incheon fined 32-year old Mr. Park one million won for saying racially discriminatory things to Bonojit Hussein, an Indian professor at Sungkonghoe University.
So some people are calling for legal reforms to ban the use of language that discriminates on the basis of race, ethnicity, or disability. Park Gyeong-shin, professor of law at Korea University, said, “It could be an infringement on the freedom of expression of high-status people who use insults, and the law is an ill-fitting way to protect the weak who are victimized by discrimination… there need to be restrictions on the ‘bad speech’ (혐오죄) that goes together with discrimination against minorities.” Jang Seo-yeon, a lawyer with the Korean Public Interest Lawyers’ Group (공익변호사 그룹), said, “We need to reduce discrimination against minorities by including racially discriminatory language in the law against discrimination.”
In the United States and the European Union, there are laws against using discriminatory language on the basis of ethnicity or disability. In our country last year, Democratic Party representative Jeon Byeong-heon introduced a law against racial discrimination, and the Ministry of Justice is considering including race in the law against discrimination.
