The pretrial detention of 96-year-old religious leader Lee Man-hee raises difficult questions about due process, religious freedom and how democracies treat those whom the majority already distrusts.
Last year I travelled to South Korea for a conference, and it remains one of the more valuable trips I have made as a journalist. It gave me something no briefing paper can: a firsthand sense of the country, its people, and the way questions of faith and law are argued there, and I came home understanding more than I did when I left.
This year my attention was pulled back to that same country for a harder reason. An organisation that works on religious-freedom issues sent me a detailed briefing and asked whether I would look at the case of a man being held in a South Korean jail at the age of 96. I read it with the caution any journalist owes material from an interested party, then checked it against the international press. The core of it held up. That is why I am writing.
The man is Lee Man-hee, founder of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a group many Koreans regard with suspicion. In June he was arrested and indicted under South Korea’s Political Parties Act. Prosecutors allege that, over three years, he directed tens of thousands of his followers to join one political party to influence its primaries and elections. A court has twice refused to release him, and his trial is now underway.
If that allegation is proven, it is serious, and the state is right to test it in court. No church stands above the law, and elections deserve protection from bloc capture by any organised group. An honest defence of this man does not pretend otherwise.
But he has not been convicted of anything, and it is his treatment before trial that should trouble us. Pretrial detention is meant for defendants who might flee or destroy evidence. Investigators already spent months searching, questioning some two hundred people, and seizing the church’s servers. The evidence is in their hands, and the flight risk posed by a frail man of 96 is close to fiction. When the reasons given for jailing someone do not match the facts, it is fair to ask what the detention is really for.
That question grows sharper because South Korea’s own leaders, months before any verdict, publicly called minority faiths social evils to be eradicated and named groups to be disbanded. A government may dislike a religion. It may not brand that religion an enemy and then prosecute its founder as if the branding were proof. There is precedent for caution. In 2020 this same man was detained and accused of obstructing pandemic control, and a court acquitted him of that charge, though it convicted him of embezzlement. The loudest accusation did not survive a judge.
I write from Antigua, and the distance is the point. Small nations watch large ones to learn what is permitted. When a prosperous democracy decides how to treat a faith most of its people find strange, it writes a lesson that travels to places with far less restraint than Seoul.
So this is not a demand to declare him innocent. It is a call for the opposite of a shortcut: a fair and open trial on the specific conduct alleged, and his release to await that trial rather than his imprisonment before it. The presumption of innocence is worth least, and matters most, when we are certain we already know the answer. A 96-year-old should be allowed to meet his accusers from outside a cell.
