Based on newly obtained information on South Korea’s criminal legislation (in the original language), Death Penalty Worldwide has significantly updated and revised its research on South Korea. Since its last execution in December 1997, South Korea’s stance on the death penalty has seemed rather ambivalent. When former President Kim Dae-jung took office in 1998, it seemed as though South Korea was beginning to inch toward abolition. Kim was a former death row inmate and an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. Yet efforts to abolish capital punishment have never moved forward – the National Assembly has failed to pass three bills aimed at abolition, and the Constitutional Court has twice upheld the death penalty in the face of constitutional challenges. In fact, South Korea passed new legislation in 2010 that expanded the number of death-eligible crimes.
South Korea’s official position in the international arena has been just as ambivalent. While repeatedly abstaining from voting on the UN General Assembly’s Moratorium on the Death Penalty Resolution, the South Korean government has expressed its willingness to consider ratifying the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR aiming at the abolition of the death penalty.
It appears, however, as though South Korea may be moving backward in the midst of a global trend against the death penalty. Current President Park Geun-hye publicly expressed her support for capital punishment five months prior to taking office, and a recent survey of college students indicated that 76% of the respondents were in favor of resuming executions in response to the rise in heinous crimes. In 2012, the government delegation stated at South Korea’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council that the abolition of the death penalty required careful review of “public opinion and … social realities.” In our view, an official moratorium on executions, let alone abolition of the death penalty, cannot be expected in the short term.