 |
| 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.
إرسال تعليق