history

During their military occupation of Korea from 1905 to 1945, the Japanese imperialists cooked up and promulgated all kinds of draconian laws in an extensive way to brutally kill numerous patriots and innocent people of Korea.

One of those laws is the “law on maintenance of public order”.

Between the late 1910s and the early 1920s, the Korean people from all walks of life put up a fierce anti-Japanese struggle to reject colonial rule and achieve national independence.

In consternation, the Japanese imperialists enforced the “law on maintenance of public order”, which they had enacted and promulgated to oppress the leftist movement forces at home, in Korea in May 1925.

It was a means of fascist colonial oppression specifying the objects of oppression, its coverage, punishments and the like.

It set political associations and labour movement organizations as objects of oppression and imposed on the members of them the death penalty, life imprisonment, penal servitude for a definite term and confinement in order to harshly repress them. It stipulated that in dealing with the cases related to the law, the authority of investigation organs and the police over disposition by legal force and summary conviction should be strengthened, the defence should be restricted to the minimum and an appeal to a superior court against the judgment at the first trial should be forbidden. Consequently, many Koreans were subjected to severe punishments by the Japanese police without undergoing legal procedures and could not exercise the right of appeal against judgments.

The preventive detention system stipulated by the law was the one to confine the Koreans who had served their full term and those under probation to a preventive detention camp claiming that there was a fear that they might commit the second offence. In that way, the Japanese imperialists detained many Korean revolutionaries and patriots in prisons or preventive detention camps all their life to keep them under surveillance and oppress them.

According to watered-down data, the cases of arrest numbered 138 539 in 1922, but they increased to 191 203 in 1925 when the law was concocted, and soared to 261 558 in 1926. Millions of Koreans were arrested by 1929.

Based on the “law on maintenance of public order”, Japan invented and promulgated different kinds of draconian laws, including the “new law on maintenance of public order” in 1928, the “act on probation of Korean political offenders” in 1936 and the “act on preventive detention of Korean political offenders” in 1941 to ruthlessly quash the anti-Japanese national liberation struggle and progressive ideological movement of the Koreans and kill a large number of them.

No matter how much water flows under the bridge and how many generations are replaced by another, the crimes of Japan, which suppressed the Korean people’s struggle to achieve national independence by cooking up fascist laws and ran amuck to annihilate the Korean nation, will never be forgiven and Japan will never be able to evade the responsibility for them.