Authors found innocent

Two Kyongsang University professors who wrote "Understanding Korean Society," which was used as a textbook for the university`s general education curriculum, were proclaimed innocent six years after the Prosecution Office caused a furor by claiming that the book benefited the enemy and launched investigations of the scholars in August 1994.

On July 24, the Changwon Provincial Court found the two defendants - professors Chang Sang-Hwan and Chung Jin-Sang - innocent of the charges against them. The prosecution had called for the professors to be handed a sentence of two years of in prison and their qualifications to be suspended for two years for allegedly violating the National Security Law.

The Justice Department stated that while some of the book`s contents were written from a historical perspective similar to North Korea`s, it was an unadorned work based on research and posed no apparent challenges to the existence of the Republic of Korea and the basic order of the country`s constitution.