In recent years, the South Korean government and networks of North Korean defectors and human rights activities have engaged in a vicious political and legal struggle over the launching of leaflet-carrying balloons into the DPRK.

This struggle developed out of Pyongyang’s demolition of the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong in June 2020, which it orchestrated in protest of the launches, and culminated in the South Korean legislature’s passage of a law that outlined punishments for flying objects into the North.

Most recently, this law resulted in the Jan. 2022 indictment of a prominent defector activist