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Legally, South Korea cannot sanction activists for releasing balloons toward the border because a 2023 court ruling banned such actions as an unreasonable infringement on free speech.
Park Sang-hak, an activist who defected from North Korea and has for years distributed anti-government leaflets into North Korea, said he released 20 balloons filled with propaganda and flash drives containing South Korean pop music and TV dramas into the border area on Thursday.
North Korea is extremely sensitive about its people’s exposure to South Korean pop culture, with a United Nations report saying possession of large amounts of such content could result in the death penalty.
Previously, tensions over these two major propaganda fronts had reached a dramatic climax.
In 2020, Pyongyang unilaterally cut off all official military and political communications with Seoul, citing anti-North Korean leaflets, and blew up an abandoned inter-Korean liaison office on the North Korean side of the border.
North Korea-South Korea relations are at their lowest point in years, with Kim Jong-un Hosting Russian leader Vladimir Putin and signed a mutual defense agreement that drew anger from Seoul.
In response, South Korea – a major arms exporter – said it would “reconsider” its long-standing policy that prevents it from directly supplying weapons to Ukraine.
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