A Seoul court on Friday cleared two former presidential officials of the charges that they destroyed the first draft of the 2007 inter-Korean summit transcript in violation of the presidential records management law.
The Seoul Central District Court said in its ruling that what they destroyed was not a presidential document because it was the initial draft that then-President Roh Moo-hyun had ordered to revise and had yet to approve.
Baek Jong-cheon, former chief security adviser to Roh, and Cho Myung-kyun, former presidential security secretary, were indicted in November 2013 on the charges of deleting the draft transcript.
“To regard the draft as a presidential record, there should be an intention of the one with the decision-making authority to approve its content as an official document,” Lee Dong-geun, the presiding judge, said in his ruling.
“But former President Roh had clearly ordered them to reconsider or revise the draft ― not to approve it, and creating the draft cannot be viewed as production of presidential records.”
Pointing out that the first draft would have had to be deleted as it carried sensitive content, the court also cleared them of the other charge of damaging an electronically stored public record.
“The draft version that comes before the final, complete version is unlikely to be used independently, and there is a concern that people can mistake it for the final version. Given this, it is appropriate to destroy it,” the ruling said.
The prosecution had claimed that whether it was a first draft or finished transcript, any such document should be preserved and transferred to the national archives. Last month, prosecutors sought a two-year jail term for both Baek and Cho.
The content of the summit transcript was at the center of political controversy during the 2012 presidential election.
Saenuri Party lawmakers claimed that during the summit between Roh and former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Roh renounced the Northern Limit Line as a de facto inter-Korean border ― a claim that could hurt the voter sentiment against opposition candidate Moon Jae-in, who served as Roh’s chief of staff.
By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)
