Supreme Court Confirms Baek Jongcheon and Cho Myunggyun Guilty for 'Discarding Inter-Korean Summit Meeting Records'... "They Are Presidential Records"

From the left, Baek Jong-cheon, former Chief of the Office of Foreign Affairs and Security at the Blue House, and Cho Myung-kyun, former Minister of Unification.

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Seok-jin, Legal Affairs Specialist] The convictions of former Blue House National Security Office Chief Baek Jong-cheon and former Minister of Unification Cho Myung-kyun (then Blue House Security Secretary) for destroying the 2007 inter-Korean summit meeting minutes have been finalized.

On the 28th, the Supreme Court's 2nd Division (Presiding Justice Cheon Dae-yeop) upheld the lower court's sentence of one year imprisonment with two years probation for the two individuals, who were indicted for violating the Presidential Records Management Act and damaging official electronic records, during the final appeal hearing.

The court stated, "There is no error in dismissing the appeal as the lower court's guilty verdict on the charges against the defendants did not violate the principles of logic and experience, did not exceed the limits of free evaluation of evidence, did not misinterpret the legal provisions concerning 'presidential records' under Article 2, Clause 1 of the Presidential Records Act, and did not violate the principle of nemo tenetur se ipsum accusare (no self-incrimination) or the principle of favorability."

While the two defendants argued on appeal that the prosecutor's claim that the specific presidential record in question was the meeting minutes file itself, not the document management card with the attached meeting minutes file, violated the principle that "judgment can only be made within the scope of the charges brought by the prosecutor," this argument was rejected.

The two were indicted for unlawfully destroying the document management card, which is a presidential record with the attached draft file of the 2007 inter-Korean summit meeting minutes, by deleting it from the main table of the Blue House e-Support System database in early 2008, thereby invalidating the electronic records used in official duties.

It was revealed that between January 30 and February 4, 2008, while preparing for the transfer of electronic records and the handover of duties to the next administration within the Blue House, they received direct deletion methods from the management company Samsung SDS for document management cards produced by the Blue House e-Support System and committed the crime accordingly.

The controversy over the destruction of the meeting minutes arose in October 2012 when Jeong Mun-heon, then a member of the Saenuri Party (predecessor of the People Power Party), stated during a National Assembly audit that former President Roh Moo-hyun had made remarks about abandoning the Northern Limit Line (NLL) during the inter-Korean summit.

The Saenuri Party raised the possibility that the inter-Korean summit meeting minutes were deliberately destroyed or concealed and reported officials from the participatory government to the prosecution. The prosecution believed that the two deleted the draft meeting minutes to hide former President Roh's 'NLL abandonment' remarks and indicted them without detention in November 2013.

However, the first and second trials acquitted them, ruling that the draft meeting minutes could not be considered 'presidential records' as they lacked former President Roh's approval.

In December 2020, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court's ruling, indicating that the two were guilty, and remanded the case to the Seoul High Court.

The Supreme Court held that former President Roh expressed his intention to establish the document as an official document by reviewing the meeting minutes and generating a signature, thereby producing the document management card as a presidential record. Although former President Roh did not give final approval on the document management card, since he reviewed and confirmed the minutes, his intention to approve could not be denied.

The meeting minutes are documents containing objective information such as the date, location, order of proceedings, and statements made during the meeting. The approval intention of the approver should be seen not as a decisive or dispositional intention like approval or permission, but as an intention to review and confirm the content. Therefore, it was judged that former President Roh's approval existed.

Accordingly, the Seoul High Court, which handled the retrial, sentenced them to one year imprisonment with two years probation in February of this year, and the two appealed again to the Supreme Court, dissatisfied with the ruling.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.