AT 6PM on March 1st, a national holiday, parliamentarians’ seats at South Korea’s National Assembly were duly deserted. But the stalls reserved for the public hummed: 150 onlookers listened attentively, some taking notes, to a monologue by the solitary Kim Ki-choon of the liberal Minjoo Party of Korea, the country’s biggest opposition group.
He was the 32nd speaker to hold forth on the wrongs of an “anti-terrorism” bill put forward by the ruling Saenuri party. Begun on February 23rd, the filibuster was South Korea’s first in over four decades, lasting eight straight days and nights, easily outstripping a record previously set by Canadian lawmakers. MPs eked out the time reading academic studies and, fittingly, passages from George Orwell’s “1984”.
The bill would grant wide-ranging new powers of surveillance to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, which has an unsavoury track record of political meddling. Last year its former head, Won Sei-hoon, was sentenced to three years in prison for directing an online smear campaign against rivals to Park Geun-hye, the president, before her election victory in 2012. Beefed-up...Continue reading
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