Adultery No Longer Illegal in South Korea

The South Korean law making adultery illegal has been
abolished.
Image:  Shutterstock

South Korea’s Constitutional Court has struck down a 62-year-old law that rendered adultery an offense punishable by up to two years in prison.  The Court cited changing social mores and a growing concern for individual rights as the main factors in this decision.

“It has become difficult to say that there is a consensus on whether adultery should be punished as a criminal offense,” five of the court’s nine justices said in a joint statement.  “It should be left to the free will and love of people to decide whether to maintain marriage, and the matter should not be externally forced through a criminal code.”

When the law was originally adopted in 1953, it was said to have been put in place to protect married women from philandering husbands; however, in practice, it was more often used to force a divorce or to blackmail women, for whom the stigma of adultery is much greater than for men.

An estimated 53,000 South Koreans have been indicted under the law since authorities started keeping track in 1985.  In more recent years, however, these issues have been more often settled out of court, in part because of the difficulty of having to prove that sex had occurred.

The law was challenged four times before this without success.  The most notable case was in 2008, when popular actress Ok So-ri was accused by her husband of adultery.  In that case, the justices came within one vote of striking the law down.

Three major women’s groups supported the decision, while others have reacted less positively.  For all that South Korea is a modern society, it was also founded on Confucian ideals, making the repeal of this law controversial.

In a related event, share prices for leading condom manufacturer Unidus rose nearly 15%, while shares of Hyundai Pharmaceutical, which markets a morning-after pill, rose 9.7%.  Analysts said investors were acting on the belief that the ruling could encourage extramarital affairs and the use of condoms.