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By Rex Wockner International News Report
 South Korea's oldest and biggest gay Web site,
Exzone.com, has been ordered by the government to
label itself a "harmful site" and prevent access by
young people.
Failure to follow the order will result in a $10,000 fine and a two-year prison sentence for the site owner, officials said. The Ministry of Information and Communications enacted an Internet content rating system last year that classifies gay Web sites as "harmful media" that must be blocked from youth. The determination followed a decision by the Korean Information and Communications Ethics Committee (ICEC) to classify homosexuality as "obscenity and perversion" in its "Criteria for Indecent Internet Sites." Activists trace that definition to a 1997 law that classifies descriptions of "homosexual love" as "harmful to youth." Since the introduction of the Internet Content Filtering Ordinance last July, more than 12,000 Web sites, including several gay ones, have been blocked, deleted, turned off or shut down. The large gay site Ivancity.com was turned off by the Internet service provider that hosted it, without any notice or request for content modification. Gay online clubs at two of Korea's biggest Web portals (Daum and Say Club) also were deleted, reportedly on orders from the ICEC.
The International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission has called for protest letters to several South Korean officials. (See www.iglhrc.org for details.) "These actions violate the right to freedom of expression, enshrined in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Korea is a signatory," IGLHRC said. "The rights of the lesbian and gay communities are not acceptable 'trade-offs' to satisfy concerns about protecting youth from viewing material considered offensive. In fact, blocking information about sexual orientation on the Internet denies access to vital, even life-saving information and community, particularly for the vulnerable population of lesbian and gay youth." |
