Supreme Court Upholds Fines for Disability Rights Activists Who Spray-Painted and Plastered Subway Station in Protest

By Juwon Kang, June 7, 2026

Background

On February 13, 2023, leaders and members of the Korea Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (전국장애인차별철폐연대, known as Jeonjangnyeon) staged a demonstration at the Samgakji Station platform on Seoul Metro Line 4. The protesters affixed hundreds of stickers bearing slogans demanding mobility rights, educational access, and employment opportunities for persons with disabilities — including a call for Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon to comply with UN deinstitutionalization guidelines — to the platform walls and floor. They also sprayed lacquer aerosol directly onto the platform floor. Station signage at the time explicitly warned that installation of materials was prohibited and could result in criminal penalties. The organization’s chairman Park Gyeong-seok and two other members were subsequently charged with joint property destruction under the Act on Punishment of Violent Acts.

Court Decisions

The first instance court acquitted all defendants, finding that the conduct had not risen to the level of impairing the functional utility of the platform.

The appellate court reversed and convicted. It found that hundreds of stickers covering walls and floors would have caused considerable inconvenience to commuters trying to locate signage and directional information, and that the platform’s appearance was substantially degraded. The court further noted that the defendants proceeded despite visible warnings against such conduct on the premises.

On May 20, 2026, the Supreme Court’s Third Criminal Division (presiding Justice Lee Heung-gu) affirmed the appellate conviction in full (Case No. 2025Do2485). Park Gyeong-seok was fined 3 million won; standing co-chairman Kwon Dal-ju and member Moon Ae-rin were each fined 1 million won.

Legal Reasoning

The central legal question was whether the defendants’ conduct qualified as justifiable act (정당행위) under Article 20 of the Criminal Act — defined as conduct that does not violate social norms, and which therefore lacks unlawfulness and cannot be punished.

The appellate court, affirmed by the Supreme Court, held that the justifiable act defense was unavailable. Even accepting that the protest was motivated by the genuine and legitimate goal of drawing public attention to the absence of mobility rights for persons with disabilities, the court found that the requirements for the defense — urgency, inevitability, proportionality, and subsidiarity — were not met. Specifically, the defendants had not demonstrated why plastering hundreds of stickers across a public station was necessary when other lawful means of protest had not been exhausted.

Why This Matters

This decision clarifies the outer boundary of the justifiable act defense in the context of protest-related property damage in Korea. Courts will not treat the merit or sincerity of an advocacy cause as a substitute for the established legal criteria: a defendant must show that lawful alternatives were genuinely unavailable or inadequate before resorting to conduct that causes property damage.

For practitioners advising civil society organizations and activist groups, the ruling is a reminder that preemptive legal planning around protest tactics matters. The subsidiarity requirement in particular places the burden on demonstrators to show they exhausted conventional channels first. Groups operating in high-visibility advocacy spaces — where pressure tactics are often seen as strategically necessary — should understand that Korean courts will assess those tactics against an objective standard, not simply defer to the importance of the underlying cause.

Article: https://www.lawtimes.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=220966