Dear President Lee,
Congratulations on your inauguration as President of the Republic of Korea. As your new government takes office, we write to you about the human rights situation in South Korea and urge that you take several important steps to help address both current and longstanding problems in the country.
Human Rights Watch is an independent nongovernmental organization dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. We monitor and report on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in about 100 countries around the world. We have been working on human rights issues in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) for more than 30 years.
The peaceful protests that preceded your election and the impeachment of former president Yoon Suk-yeol underscore South Koreans’ commitment to accountable governance and provide an important opportunity to strengthen democratic institutions, advance the rule of law, and protect and promote human rights both domestically and across the Korean peninsula. We urge you to take concrete steps to defend fundamental civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights in the areas specified below.
Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to a constructive relationship with your government and will be pleased to discuss these and other matters of mutual concern with you and members of your administration at any time.
Yours sincerely,
Elaine Pearson
Asia Director
Human Rights Watch
Key Human Rights Concerns in the Republic of Korea
June 2025
Freedoms of Expression, Assembly, and the Media
In South Korea, criminal defamation laws and the National Security Law continue to chill free speech and enable politically motivated prosecutions. The National Security Law criminalizes positive comments about North Korea and the possession of materials alleged to be North Korean propaganda. The convictions under the defamation laws are not based on the veracity of the accused’s statements, but whether they are in the “public interest.” The December 2024 martial law declaration showed how emergency powers can imperil democratic space in the country.
We urge your government to:
- Repeal the National Security Law and address genuine threats to national security through existing criminal laws.
- Reform existing laws to end the criminalization of defamation and stop bringing criminal defamation charges against journalists or other members of the media for criticizing the government.
- Ensure presidential emergency powers are consistent with international human rights law.
Discrimination
Despite widespread support for anti-discrimination legislation, South Korea remains one of the two countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 high-income economies, without a comprehensive anti-discrimination law.
We urge your government to:
- Pass a comprehensive anti-discrimination law that would provide equal protections against all forms of discrimination and safeguard the rights of women and marginalized groups.
Rights of Women and Girls
Discrimination against women and girls in South Korea is widespread and structural. Women and girls in South Korea face the widest pay gap between men and women in all OECD countries, as well as an uptick in digital sex crimes, including a 227 percent increase in registered cases involving artificial intelligence (AI)-generated deepfake sexual images that primarily target high school girls and young women.
We urge your government to:
- Take urgent actions to protect women and girls from all forms of gender-based violence, including online gender-based violence (such as digital sex crimes).
- Establish comprehensive and effective protections against gender discrimination, including in the workplace through strong anti-discrimination legislation that includes protections for women and girls.
- Implement measures that increase women’s economic and leadership opportunities, including those that guarantee pay transparency and equal pay.
- Adopt legislation aimed at reducing the prevalence and impact of digital sex crimes, including by reforming the provision of sexuality education, as discussed in greater detail below, to ensure that it aligns with international best practices and provides young people with a strong understanding of consent and gender-based violence including in a digital context.
- Ensure that investigations of alleged digital sex crimes are survivor-centered, and work closely with platforms to ensure the full and permanent removal of all abusive content.
- Ratify and fully implement the International Labor Organization Convention No. 190 on Violence and Harassment at Work.
LGBT Rights
Same-sex couples in South Korea lack the same legal recognition and protections as their heterosexual counterparts, and face discrimination in family and inheritance law, taxation, housing, and other areas of law and policy.
Article 92-6 of the Military Criminal Act criminalizes same-sex sexual acts with “a military person” regardless of whether the acts are consensual or happened within or outside of military facilities. This article was upheld by the Constitutional Court in October 2023.
We urge your government to:
- Legalize same-sex marriage and ensure that same-sex couples have access to family and inheritance, housing, and taxation benefits.
- Repeal article 92-6 of the Military Criminal Act and drop prosecutions for consensual same-sex conduct in the military.
Children’s Rights and Digital Safety
In South Korea, girls are the primary victims of AI-generated deepfake child sexual abuse and digital sex crime material, while refugee and migrant, disabled, and LGBT children face educational barriers and discrimination in schools. This new form of tech-enabled sexual abuse is facilitated by the continuing absence of adequate protections by the government and platforms, as well as the lack of comprehensive sexuality education that meets international standards and provides age-appropriate and accurate information on sexual health, consent, healthy relationships, and gender equality. Without this sexuality education, children are less able to distinguish between healthy sexual relationships and abuse, and more likely to normalize coercive sexual behaviors and misinterpret or feel unable to report or seek help in response to sexual abuse. Many children also lack the language to describe sexual exploitation, especially in digital spaces.
We urge your government to:
- Require comprehensive and rights-respecting education on sexuality and digital literacy in all schools.
- Ensure that education programs are inclusive and rights-based.
- Require that tech companies fully enforce their content moderation policies and strengthen user reporting mechanisms to better protect children’s rights.
- Participate actively in the Intergovernmental Working Group in Geneva on September 1-4, 2025, and support an optional protocol that explicitly recognizes every child’s right to early childhood care and free public education from pre-primary through secondary school.
Digital Rights and Privacy
You recently pledged to make South Korea an “AI powerhouse,” which will be supported by the newly enacted Basic Act on the Development of Artificial Intelligence and the Establishment of a Trust-based Foundation, known as AI Basic Act, which sets the national framework for advancing AI technologies. You announced plans for public investment in AI infrastructure but have not proposed regulations on AI to ensure that the technology protects digital rights and is not exploited to abuse children and engage in digital sex crimes. Without these provisions, efforts to promote AI technology risk undermining privacy rights and exacerbating existing discrimination and abuse. In addition, the UN Convention on Cybercrime, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2024, could facilitate unchecked surveillance if not carefully aligned with international human rights law.
We urge your government to:
- Ensure human rights protections, including privacy, transparency, non-discrimination, and safeguards that protect children’s rights and prevent digital sex crimes, into the implementation of the AI Basic Act and other AI development projects.
- Pass robust data-protection laws and ensure judicial oversight of surveillance.
- Require human rights impact assessments for government-funded AI infrastructure and public-private AI partnerships.
- Withhold ratifying the UN Cybercrime Convention until it can be demonstrated that domestic safeguards are in place in South Korea to ensure adequate protection of privacy and freedom of expression.
Older People’s Rights
Laws and policies that discriminate against older workers and rampant ageism put older people at risk of financial and mental harm that affects a number of basic rights. They permit employers to adopt a mandatory retirement age of 60 or older, regardless of their workers’ job skills, while the “peak wage” system allows employers to reduce older workers’ wages during the three to five years preceding their mandatory retirement. South Korea has the highest poverty rate among older people in the OECD, with older women being disproportionately affected.
We urge your government to:
- Abolish the mandatory retirement age of 60 or older and the peak wage system, and ensure all differential treatment based on age does not amount to discrimination.
- Review re-employment programs to ensure older people have equal access to just, favorable, and meaningful employment opportunities that provide at least a living wage.
- Review whether the Basic Pension, the National Pension System’s Old Age Pension, and other social security entitlements are adequate to guarantee older people an income at least equivalent to a living wage, and ensure they are available to everyone.
Holding Companies Accountable, Climate Justice, and Environmental Rights
Many South Korean companies have operations abroad, ranging from investments to manufacturing. Foreign corporations also have parts of their value chains in South Korea. These connections bring with them responsibilities to protect human rights, labor rights, environmental and climate impacts. Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, companies have a responsibility to identify, prevent, mitigate, and remediate these risks and harms. In recent years, South Korean civil society organizations have urged the South Korean government to enact a robust mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence law that addresses such impacts.
The burning of fossil fuels remains South Korea’s main source of greenhouse gas emissions. In August 2024, the Constitutional Court ruled that the government was failing to safeguard the fundamental rights of young people with its inadequate emissions reduction targets.
We urge your government to:
- Enact robust climate legislation that sets greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets that are in accordance with South Korea’s obligations under the Paris Agreement on climate change and are in line with the best available science, notably the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5 degrees Celsius report from 2018.
- Adopt a science-based emissions-reduction pathway and transparent accountability mechanisms.
- Adopt a moratorium on the import of wood pellets and on new fossil fuel projects – notably Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) projects and financing – and instead invest in renewable energy sources that do not fuel deforestation.
- Adopt a mandatory environmental and human rights due diligence law that requires all companies to map and monitor their value chains, and identify, mitigate, and remediate actual and potential human rights and adverse environmental impacts, including to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from scopes 1 through 3. Such laws should apply to all sectors and carry a combination of administrative penalties and other forms of civil and criminal liability for corporations, with a right of action in courts, drawing from the best comparative practices from the United Kingdom, European Union and its member states, and the United States.
Policy on Human Rights in North Korea
The human rights situation in North Korea remains dire. However, South Korea’s policy on North Korean human rights has been deeply politicized, with past administrations choosing either unprincipled engagement or muted attempts at human rights promotion. The 2016 North Korean Human Rights Act created important mechanisms, such as the North Korean Human Rights Foundation, which has yet to be established. In your inaugural address, you pledged to promote dialogue and peace on the Korean peninsula, but did not address human rights concerns in North Korea.
North Korea’s deployment of soldiers to Ukraine raises responsibilities for South Korea. North Korean prisoners of war who express reluctance to return to North Korea—as one such soldier did in January—could face enforced disappearance, torture, wrongful imprisonment, forced labor, or execution for disobeying orders or attempting desertion if returned to North Korea. Under the North Korean Defectors Protection and Settlement Support Act, North Korean escapees who want to live in South Korea can receive protection and support from the South Korean government.
We urge your government to:
- Ensure that North Korea’s human rights abuses are addressed in tandem with concerns surrounding international peace and security, and integrate human rights benchmarks into any engagement, humanitarian, or development dialogue with North Korea.
- Fully implement the 2016 North Korean Human Rights Act, including promptly establishing and funding the North Korean Human Rights Foundation.
- Commit to protecting the rights of North Korean escapees, including captured soldiers and refugees abroad.
- Ensure that North Korean prisoners of war are informed of their rights, treated with dignity, and protected from forced return to North Korea if they express reluctance to return to North Korea, where they could be subject to imprisonment, torture, or summary execution, in violation of the principle of nonrefoulement.
Capital Punishment
South Korea has not executed anyone since 1997 but still retains the death penalty in various laws. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all circumstances because of its inherent cruelty.
We urge your government to:
- Commute all death sentences, abolish the death penalty, and ratify the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
