Candlelight protests were illegally organized, S. Korean court rules

SEOUL — The South Korean high court has ruled the massive candlelight protests that followed the 2002 deaths of two young Korean girls crushed by a U.S. armored vehicle were illegally organized.

The Supreme Court, in a ruling issued Tuesday, upheld a previous decision that sentenced the protest organizer to an 18-month suspended prison sentence for “violent conduct” and failing to file proper paperwork for the demonstrations.

The protest organizer had argued the events were memorials for the two girls and therefore did not require paperwork to be filed. But the court disagreed, pointing out that participants chanted political slogans and marched to the U.S. Embassy in Seoul

At least 14 such rallies were held from July 2002 to October 2003, the court said.

The violent conduct, the court said, included flicking lit cigarettes at riot police assigned to monitor the events.

While saying they had no problem with the rallies or their political nature, the justices nonetheless ruled the events should have been organized within the laws covering such gatherings.

“The candlelight vigils were beyond commemoration and thus required prior reporting to the police,” the court ruling read.

According to the Korea Times, the protest organizer rejected the latest ruling and said he would request a retrial.

“The court gave the guilty verdict not only to me, but also to the hundreds of citizens who participated in the rallies,” the paper quoted Kim Jong-il, the protest organizer who has no relation to the North Korean leader of the same name, as saying.

The rallies were part of months of disturbances following the June 2002 incident, in which a 2nd Infantry Division armored vehicle struck Shin Hyo-sun and Shim Mi-son on a curvy road leading to a training area.

Two soldiers were charged in the deaths but acquitted by a military court. U.S. officials — including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — repeatedly expressed regret over the incident.