Dear President Lee: The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by your administration’s increasing pressure on the Republic of Korea’s media. The arrest on April 28 of four staff members with your country’s second-largest broadcaster, Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), is only the most recent step in what appears to be a broader effort to stifle independent reporting critical of government policies.
Park Dae-sung, who blogs under the name Minerva, was acquitted of charges in South Korea on April 20, 2009, under a rarely used law of “spreading false information with the intent of harming the public interest.” The Seoul court that heard his case ruled that Park wrote without malicious intent, even if his articles were…
BANGLADESH | FIJI | SINGAPORE | SOUTH KOREA BANGLADESH • Cartoonist Arifur Rahman was freed from Dhaka Central Jail on March 21. He was detained in September 2007, supposedly to prevent him from committing “a prejudicial act” against public order, after the daily Prothom Alo published his cartoon of a boy calling a cat “Muhammad.”…