Seoul sends back remains of war dead
Constitutional court upholds strict anti-prostitution law
SEOUL, March 31, (AFP): South Korea on Thursday sent the remains of dozens of Chinese soldiers killed during 1950-53 Korean War back to China for a final burial in their homeland.
Coffins carrying the remains of 36 soldiers -- excavated by South Korea’s Defence Ministry from March to November last year -- were flown from Incheon airport to the northeastern city of Shenyang, where China has a state cemetery for its war dead.
In a separate ceremony on Monday, the remains, including bone fragments and skulls, had been placed in the coffins at a temporary mortuary in Paju, near the border with North Korea.
In 2013, South Korean President Park Geun-Hye had offered to return the bodies of the Chinese war dead as a goodwill gesture during a visit to Beijing.
Since then, Seoul has repatriated a total of 505 sets of remains, flying them back every year ahead of the annual Chinese Qingming, or tomb-sweeping, festival when many people visit and clean the graves of their ancestors. This year’s festival falls on April 4. China fought alongside North Korea in the 1950-53 conflict -- its dramatic and crucial intervention coming after US-led forces had pushed the North Korean army into the far north of the peninsula.
Disputed
Casualty figures remain disputed but Western estimates commonly cite a figure of 400,000 Chinese deaths, while Chinese sources mention a toll of about 180,000. The bodies were initially buried in small plots scattered around the country.
In 1996, Seoul designated a special cemetery plot in Paju, just south of the heavily fortified border with North Korea, where all the remains of Chinese and North Korean soldiers still on South Korean soil could be buried together. More than 700 North Korean soldiers are interred at Paju, but Pyongyang has ignored Seoul’s offer to return them despite sporadic talks on the issue.
The site also holds the bodies of more than two dozen North Korean commandos killed in a daring but unsuccessful 1968 attack on the presidential palace in Seoul.
A North Korean agent responsible for the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people, who committed suicide after he was captured, is also there.
South Korea’s Constitutional Court on Thursday upheld a strict anti-prostitution law that punishes individual
women who trade sex for money.
The legislation, enacted in 2004, carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a fine of three million won ($2,580) for anyone convicted of selling or purchasing sex.
Thursday’s ruling centred on a case brought in 2012 by a then 41-year-old prostitute. She challenged her arrest and 500,000 won fine, arguing that punishing voluntary prostitution, especially when the sex worker has no other means of income, violated her constitutional rights.
However, the court rejected the idea that buying and selling sex could be non-coercive.
“Prostitution is violent and exploitative in its nature, and therefore cannot be seen as a free transaction,” the judges said in a six-to-three ruling.
The decision sparked angry reactions among sex workers and activists
present.
“The establishment has no sympathy for sex workers, driving them to death,” Kang Hyun-Joon, an activist who runs a sex workers association, told journalists.
“Aren’t we part of the Korean people?” sex worker Jang Se-Hee asked tearfully. “They have no consideration for us.”
Prior to the 2004 act, prostitution, while nominally illegal, was largely tolerated in South Korea with officials and police turning a blind eye to thriving red-light districts.
But the law, prompted in part by public outrage over a fire two years earlier that killed 14 young prostitutes trapped in their rooms, specifically criminalised the act of prostitution.
It led to a significant increase in police crackdowns in an apparent effort to eradicate the practice entirely.
Critics say the legislation has had little impact beyond closing red-light districts and driving prostitution underground, where it is harder to monitor for sex-trafficking and abuse.
The court’s decision had been highly anticipated after last year’s ruling to decriminalise adultery -- a reflection of changing societal trends in a country where rapid modernisation has frequently clashed with traditionally conservative norms.
During a hearing into the prostitution case, a lawyer representing the Justice Ministry said the 2004 law was about protecting human dignity.
“In order to root out prostitution, criminal punishment is inevitable,” the lawyer said.
“Prostitution has nothing to do with rights to sex or freedom to choose occupations, as it turns human bodies into the objects of commercial deals,”