“Stay Still”: Sewol, a Tale of Fatal Censorship, Fatal Paternalism

Abstract

Analyzing Korea’s laws and legal systems, this chapter develops a legal-cultural explanation of the Sewol ferry incident and its aftermath that places hierarchy-oriented Korean mentality as a deep cultural root of the problem. It examines the laws and legal systems of the country that are causally related to the beginning, processes and aftermath of the tragedy. Hierarchy interferes with efficient and correct decision-making in disaster situations, as Gladwell points out in Outlier, and most victims of the Sewol ferry sinking suffered from their fatal failure to challenge the completely misinformed order from higher up the hierarchical chain: “Stay Still.” As the Sewol’s victims poignantly demonstrated—with their lives—a fatal consequence resulting from Korea’s hierarchical culture that discourages the masses from challenging the authority of superiors, so does the incident’s aftermath reveal the country’s state paternalism in its liberal deployment of criminal defamation suits. This chapter argues that the legal culture embeds a recent crisis of seditious libel and criminal defamation actions aiming to suppress particular forms of speech: criticisms of the higher chain of the command in a country which is dominated by state paternalism . In doing so, this chapter makes comparisons with and evaluations against an international human rights regime on freedom of speech and the state practices of several major countries.