(EDITORIAL from the Korea Herald on Dec. 27)

Backward step

The Defense Ministry's recent decision to indefinitely postpone the
implementation of alternative service for conscientious objectors is a step
backward in the country's progress in human rights. The military announced last
year that it would establish an alternative service for conscientious objectors.
Currently, those who evade conscription are sent to jail. Of the 300,000 men who
are conscripted each year, some 750 refuse to join the military on religious or
moral grounds.
According to the plan, the service term would be 36 months and would be very
demanding, including working at leprosy hospitals, tuberculosis hospitals and
mental hospitals. The rights of conscientious objectors were largely ignored
until the early 2000s, mostly because of the security situation of the Korean
Peninsula and rule by successive authoritarian regimes that had roots in the
military.
The decision by the military last year to allow alternative service for
conscientious objectors starting in 2009 was arrived at after much pressure from
human rights groups, including the United Nations.
A turning point in the debate about conscientious objectors came in 2002 when a
court accepted the petition of a conscientious objector and requested a
constitutional review whether the Military Service Act, which punishes
conscientious objectors, is unconstitutional. Two years later, the Constitutional
Court ruled that the Military Service Act was not unconstitutional. The
Constitutional Court recommended that legislators assess the possibility of
adopting an alternative service system.
In 2005, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea recommended that the
government recognize the individual's right to conscientious objection and called
for alternative forms of service to be considered. In 2006, the U.N. Commission
on Human Rights expressed deep concern regarding Korea's failure to recognize
conscientious objection and its punishment of conscientious objectors. The
Commission on Human Rights pointed out that Korea violated Article 18 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Korea is a
signatory. The right to conscientious objection to military service is defined in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In announcing the plan to implement an alternative system, the Defense Ministry
in September 2007 said that it had decided to introduce alternative service to
protect the human rights of conscientious objectors and to prevent them from
being branded as draft dodgers. The ministry also cited a survey conducted in
July 2007, which showed that 50.2 percent of respondents approved of alternative
service.
How odd, then, that a year later, the ministry is scrapping the plan, claiming
that the plan is premature at this point. It used a telephone survey of 2,000
people to back up its claim that people were against offering alternative service
for conscientious objectors. The survey showed that more than 68 percent objected
to an alternative service system.
Critics point to several flaws in the survey -- it did not explain that an
alternative service would involve working in very demanding fields, such as
working in leprosy hospitals or tuberculosis hospitals, and that the term of
service, 36 months, was twice as long as that served by conscripts in the
military, for example.
Basing an abrupt change in position on a flawed survey will give little
legitimacy to the Defense Ministry's plan to scrap the alternative service
system. The issue of minority rights needs to be dealt with more sensitivity than
a randomized telephone survey of largely uninformed respondents.
How well minority human rights are protected is a measure of the maturity of a
democracy. It is unfortunate that the government has decided to not take that
next step toward progress in the field of human rights.
(END)