Seoul High Court calls off defector group's license repeal over anti

An activist prepares to launch balloons containing anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets at Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, in this April 2016 file photo. Korea Times file

The Seoul High court on Friday ordered the government to reverse its decision to revoke the license of a North Korean defectors' group for sending anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets over to the North.

The court ruling came after the unification ministry revoked the license of Fighters for a Free North Korea, after it sent plastic balloons carrying some 500,000 anti-North propaganda flyers northward, in defiance of the government's ban on such activities in 2020.

The defector group filed a lawsuit to reverse the ministry's decision, but the district and appeals courts both sided with the government, saying the anti-North leafleting "goes against the public interest."

However, the Supreme Court struck down the two previous rulings and sent the case back to the high court for retrial in April.

In South Korea, North Korean defector groups, like Fighters for a Free North Korea, send big plastic balloons carrying leaflets over to the North in what they say is a bid to free North Korean people from the tyrannical North Korean regime with outside information.

In 2021, a revision to the Development of Inter-Korean Relations Act went into force during the previous Moon Jae-in administration to prohibit the launching of anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border on the grounds that such leafleting could provoke the North to undertake bellicose acts.

But in September this year, the Constitutional Court struck down the ban, citing freedom of expression. (Yonhap)