Supreme Court: Chun Doo-hwan’s Memoir Distorted the May 18 Democratization Movement

Liability Confirmed for Total Damages of 70 Million Won

The Supreme Court has finalized a ruling that the memoir of the late former President Chun Doo-hwan distorted the May 18 Democratization Movement and defamed an eyewitness.

On the 12th, the Supreme Court’s Third Division (Presiding Justice Lee Heung-gu) dismissed the defendants’ appeal and upheld the lower court’s ruling partially in favor of the plaintiffs in a damages lawsuit filed by four May 18 civic groups, including the May 18 Memorial Foundation, and Father Cho Young-dae, nephew of the late Father Cho Bi-o, against Chun and his son Chun Jae-guk.

As a result, Chun’s widow Lee Soon-ja and his son must each pay 15 million won to the four May 18 civic groups, and 10 million won to Father Cho. In addition, the injunction prohibiting the publication and distribution of the memoir unless the problematic passages are deleted has been definitively confirmed. Chun died in November 2021, while the appeal trial was still underway, but his widow Lee Soon-ja succeeded to the litigation as heir and the trial continued.

This case began when Chun published Volume 1 of his memoir, “The Era of Chaos,” in 2017. In the book, he denounced Father Cho, who witnessed helicopter gunfire, as “Satan in disguise” and described the May 18 Democratization Movement as a “riot.”

The courts of first and second instance found dozens of passages in the memoir to be false statements. Both courts held that claims in the memoir such as the theory of North Korean military involvement, the denial of helicopter gunfire by martial law troops, and the description that martial law troops used firearms only in the exercise of self-defense were all false statements lacking any objective basis. In particular, the appellate court also found false the passage that described a soldier who was killed after being run over by a martial law armored vehicle as having been “run over by a protester’s armored vehicle.”

The Supreme Court ruled, “Considering the relevant final judgments and the results of the Ministry of National Defense’s investigation, it has been proven that all of the disputed statements are false.”

In addition, this ruling is legally significant in that it broadly recognizes the scope of the rights of bereaved family members in cases of defamation against the deceased. The Supreme Court, in upholding the damages claim filed by Father Cho Young-dae, nephew of Father Cho Bi-o, stated, “The scope of bereaved family members whose feelings of remembrance for the deceased have been infringed is not limited only to the ‘bereaved family’ as defined under the Act on Press Arbitration and Remedies, etc. for Damage Caused by Press Reports.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.