After four Jehovah’s Witnesses in South Korea who refused military service as conscientious objectors challenged the law, an August 30, 2011, ruling by the Constitutional Court of South Korea has said that there is no basis to declare unconstitutional the laws penalizing conscientious objectors who refuse military service.
Though a 2004 ruling on the country’s Military Service Act held that legislators were obliged to make an alternative provision accommodating conscientious objectors, 5000 conscientious objectors, all young men with no criminal records, have been convicted in past 7 years. In spite of the United Nations Human Rights Committee criticism that South Korea’s Military Service Act violates basic human rights, the state continues to convict persons who refuse military service on religious belief grounds. According to the Jehovah’s Witnesses media website, Dae-il Hong, spokesman for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Korea, lamented the decision,
The decision is disappointing, because the Court had the opportunity to acknowledge the right to freedom of conscience and terminate the trials and imprisonment of principled young men. We hope that the legislature will soon bring Korea in line with the rest of the world by providing an alternative civilian service program. Conscientious objectors are not criminals and should be given the opportunity to serve as productive members of their communities
The Jehovah’s Witnesses media website says that, more than 16,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been sentenced to a combined total of 31,256 years, since 1950, for refusing to perform military service and about 500 to 900 will continue to be convicted each year. Many observers of the Jehovah’s Witnesses policy of refusing military service approve of it as based on sound New Testament principles and praise Jehovah Witness’s pacifism as refreshingly different in a world of the “Christian Nationalism” of fundamentalist evangelicals which overtly promotes aggressive and militant foreign policy on a reading of the Old Testament in preference to the Christian New Testament http://www.goddiscussion.com
