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| Samcheong Reeducation Camp, a civilian concentration camp set up by the military junta in the early 1980s / Korea Times file |
A man was acquitted in a retrial Monday of charges stemming from his escape from a detention center under the military government four decades ago.
The 69-year-old man is one of the victims of the notorious Samcheong Reeducation Camp program, under which tens of thousands of inmates suffered beatings and cruel treatment in military facilities from August 1980 to January 1981.
After serving one month in the camp and an additional six months of forced labor, he was put into a five-year protective custody in another military base.
In August 1981, he broke out from the facility but turned himself in days later and was charged with violating the Social Protection Act. He was sentenced to four months in prison in December 1981, and the ruling was confirmed by the Supreme Court in April 1982.
In a retrial Monday, a court in Wonju, 132 kilometers east of Seoul, ruled him not guilty, citing the illegality of Martial Law Order No. 13, under which both Samcheong Reeducation Camp and the Social Protection Act were established.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled the order unconstitutional and that the Samcheong program was a massive human rights violation caused by the illegal exercise of public power.
"The martial law order is unconstitutional and illegal, thus invalid," the court said.
"As long as the martial law order is unconstitutional, he must be judged not guilty of charges of escaping the detention camp he was put into under the order," the court said.
The Samcheong camp was set up north of Seoul in August 1980 after Chun Doo-hwan, then an Army general, took power through a military coup in 1979. Chun, who died last year, had ruled the country between 1980 and 1988.
The military junta arrested 60,755 civilians and sent about 40,000 of them to the Samcheong camp under the pretext of restoring social order.
Beatings and harsh treatment resulted in the deaths of 54 people during the camp's six-month operation. An additional 367 people died from various aftereffects after being released from the camp. (Yonhap)
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