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Baek Nam-ki, a farmer, lies unconscious after being blasted by pressured water cannons containing tear gas during a civic demonstration on Nov. 14, 2015. Police fired indiscriminately upon demonstrators and reporters alike. Baek died from his injuries on Sept. 25, 2016.
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Seven justices of Constitutional Court says police were violating “freedom of assembly”
South Korea’s Constitutional Court has ruled that it was unconstitutional for the police to blast demonstrators with water cannons filled with a solution containing tear gas. A constitutional petition was filed by an individual surnamed Jang and others who had participated in a demonstration about investigating the Sewol ferry sinking, claiming that the police’s “water cannon car operational guidelines” violated the people’s right to life without any legal grounds. On May 31, the court ruled that the police’s actions had been unconstitutional, with seven justices siding with the majority and two dissenting. “Mixing tear gas into a solution and spraying that on demonstrators according to internal guidelines at the National Police Agency, but no legal grounds, is an unconstitutional exercise of public authority that inflicts physical harm on the demonstrators and violates the freedom of assembly,” the Constitutional Court concluded. “Hazardous equipment must be used for the purpose and in the manner originally designated, and legal grounds are required for it to be used for another purpose or in a different manner. Since blasting tear gas from a high-pressure water cannon car increases the cannon’s lethal capacity, it represents a new kind of hazardous equipment, but there is no basis for this in the law or presidential decrees,” the court said. “There continue to be incidents in which demonstrators are injured or killed by the inappropriate operation of water cannon cars. It is necessary to strictly limit the operation of water cannon cars by framing legal provisions that stipulate their specific operational method and protocol,” the court said. In their dissent, Hon. Kim Chang-jong and Hon. Cho Yong-ho wrote that “firing a mixed solution is designed to suppress urgent threats and to preserve social and public order and thus cannot be regarded as a new kind of hazardous equipment.” Jang and the other individuals who filed the constitutional petition claimed that they had been harmed when the police sprayed them with a solution containing tear gas during a demonstration demanding an investigation into the tragic sinking of the Sewol ferry, which was held around Jongno, Seoul, on May 1, 2015. By Yeo Hyeon-ho, senior staff writer Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
