Amnesty urges S. Korea to release activist

SEOUL, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Amnesty International has called for the release of a South Korean man indicted for re-posting messages from the North Korean government's Twitter account.

The human rights group said in news release Park Jeonggeun, a 24-year-old South Korean Socialist Party activist, was charged with violating the country's national security law for re-posting the messages, including one that said "long live Kim Jong-Il!" – a reference to the North Korean leader who died Dec. 17.

Park, who has been held at Seoul Detention Center since Jan. 11, also posted Web links and North Korean propaganda songs and an altered North Korean poster in which he replaced a soldier's face with his own and the soldier's rifle with a bottle of whiskey.

Amnesty said his posts were designed to ridicule North Korean leaders, not support them.

"This is not a national security case; it's a sad case of the South Korean authorities' complete failure to understand sarcasm," Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Director, said in the release.

"Imprisoning anyone for peaceful expression of their opinions violates international law but in this case, the charges against Park Jeonggeun are simply ludicrous and should be dropped immediately."

Amnesty said the South Korean Socialist Party has often criticized North Korea for exploiting its labor force, outlawing trade unions and forcing people to work under "appalling conditions."

Zarifi criticized South Korean authorities for using the national security law to "restrict basic freedoms and gag civil society in the name of national security."

"My intention was to lampoon North Korea's leaders for a joke; I did it for fun," Park told Amnesty International.

Amnesty said during military rule in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, people were regularly imprisoned under the national security law and torture, forced confessions and unfair trials were common.

Authorities have "increasingly used the [law] to harass critics of the government's North Korea policies since 2008," when President Lee Myung-bak took office, Amnesty said.