Sexually degrading messages about Itaewon crowd crush victims could be criminal, says top court
Published: 05 Jan. 2025, 16:05
Updated: 06 Jan. 2025, 14:26
![A narrow alley in Itaewon, Yongsan District, central Seoul, where a deadly crowd crush occurred on Oct. 29, 2022, seen a day before the second anniversary of the Itaewon tragedy. [NEWS1]](https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/data/photo/2025/01/06/089bd37e-ef39-401c-b7f6-96ffb1a914e1.jpg)
A narrow alley in Itaewon, Yongsan District, central Seoul, where a deadly crowd crush occurred on Oct. 29, 2022, seen a day before the second anniversary of the Itaewon tragedy. [NEWS1]
The Supreme Court said Sunday that sexually degrading online messages about victims of the Itaewon crowd crush disaster of 2022 could be considered criminally obscene materials.
The Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s acquittal of an individual charged with distributing obscene materials under the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection.
The court said the case had been remanded to the Seoul Central District Court.
The individual was indicted for posting messages in an online gaming group chat on Oct. 30, 2022, shortly after the Itaewon tragedy, that sexually degraded and insulted female victims of the incident.
The key issue in the trial was whether the individual's messages legally constituted obscene language.
The first and second trial courts acquitted the individual, ruling that the messages did not qualify as obscene. An appellate court concurred with this reasoning.
However, the Supreme Court disagreed, determining that the messages could be viewed as obscene.
“The messages described the shape and texture of certain body parts of female victims in their twenties who died in an unexpected accident,” the court ruling said. “They explicitly revealed content such as a desire to touch specific parts of the victims' corpses or to engage in sexual acts with the deceased, degrading the victims’ remains.”
“Reducing the bodies of deceased individuals — who should be the subjects of mourning and remembrance — to mere tools or objects for sexual pleasure and expressing such illegal, antisocial acts transcends mere vulgarity or immorality,” the court said.
“It significantly distorts and damages the dignity and value of individuals as human beings,” the court said. “By writing such messages in a chat room accessed by an unspecified number of people, the obscene language was displayed publicly.”
BY KIM MIN-YOUNG [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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