The Fierce Struggle of the Korean Disability Movement to Secure State Budget and Legislation for People with Disabilities
Radick Park (ISC, Policy Research Team, Organizing Director of SADD)
Translated into English by Alice S. Kim(Translate Team)
October 28, 2022 marked the 212th day of protest at Hyehwa Station (Seoul Metro Line 4) by the Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination movement (SADD). It’s been nearly a year since Koreans with disabilities called for their rights to mobility, work, education, and inclusive life in the community.
SADD has carried out 41 rounds of subway protests called “taking the subway at rush hour” in order to raise awareness about disability rights. Each morning at 7:30 or 8 A.M., disability rights activists and like-minded citizens try to stall the subway or get on or off the subway as a group and move to the next train car. This method of protest inevitably delays the subway operation by 30 minutes to 2 hours at most, which triggers anger among citizens complaining about lateness to work or school, revealing all the hidden antipathy and discrimination against disabled people.
“You cannot help disabled people this way,” “It’s not right to take hostage citizens going to work,” “This is exactly why you are crippled,” “Go to the Parliament or Yongsan Presidential Office (before the Yoon administration, it was Blue House),” or “Why all the fuss? You are living a comfortable life with our taxes.” Such responses from subway riders reflect the hostility, discrimination, and exclusion faced by the Korean disability movement every morning. People who claim that the movement is “taking citizens hostage” reveal through such insults that they do not recognize people with disabilities as their fellow citizens. As such, Korean people with disabilities remain the respresentative social minority deprived of rights to mobility, work, education, inclusive life in the community, and deinstitutionalization. Behind complaints to the effect that people with disabilities get all the benefits without paying any taxes is the assumption that people with disabilities are people who should be pitied and subject to charity and not deserving of basic rights.
Not surprisingly, people do not listen carefully to what this social minority group is saying using “legitimate” methods like press conferences, official letters, or interviews. Since the 2001 mobility rights struggle in which activists chained themselves to subway tracks and placed themselves in front of buses, the Korean disability rights movement has learned that “the higher echelons of this society just do not listen even to the numerous attempts to deliver their demands in legitimate ways.” Based on this history, the Korean disability rights movement continues to block roads and disrupt subway commutes to make their voices heard. In other words, it’s not that the movement chose not to use any “legitimate means,” but experiencing “legitimate violence” in the face of “legitimate means” time and time again has led the movement to cry out their message on the subway lines.
Such discrimination, hostility, and excusion were aggravated when Junseok Lee, the former leader of convervative People Power Party, criticized SADD via social media. People blatantly tore the movement’s awareness raising poster, threatened to kill a person on a wheelchair who was just taking a rest in front of the SADD office, or stalked SADD Co-representative Kyeong-seok Park with a body camera, and cursed at Park when confronted. The Seoul Metro raised a multi-million Won damage suit and even posted an online presentation about how to effectively quash the movement and concentrate criticism around it, egging on hostility against people with disabilities. The new Commissioner of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, Kwangho Kim, said in his inauguration speech, “[The Police] will punish them even if we have to chase them to the ends of the earth,” treating disability rights activists as felons and shamefacedly boasting his discriminatory views.
This kind of hostility was extended to attacking even the basic rights demanded by people with disabilities. All sorts of distortions and hostility against the movement poured out, such as claims that the movement is demanding far more than mobility rights; or that the right to deinstitutionalization or independent living sought by SADD is actually a ploy for their own financial gain. However, this hostile society fails to notice that as much as their rights are intricately connected to their daily lives, so are the rights of persons with disabilities. When the minority demands the very rights the majority enjoys, the society moves to distort the demands of the minority group and accuse them of ulterior motives.
Representative Jaehyung Choi even went as far as to describe the promotion of deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities who have difficulties with decision-making or self-expression as illegal or a violation of human rights. The Korean parliamentarian has positioned himself against the deinstitutionalization trend among international organizations such as the UN and key advanced nations. The general comment No.5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the final comment on the second and third joint review of Korea’s CRPD periodic reports both recommended providing assistance in decision making and self-expression in order to provide equal opportunities for people with disabilities to live independently.
SADD’s demands for disability rights legislation are as follows.
Enactment of the Disabilities Rights Act for “realizing UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”
Enactment of the Deinstitutionalization of Persons with Disabilities Act to “fully integrate persons with disabilities into the community”
Amendment of the Act on Support of Persons with Disabilities Act to “fully integrate persons with disabilities into the community”
Enactment of the Special Act on the Promotion of Employment for the Severely Disabled to “guarantee public job for persons with severe disabilities”
Amendment of the Special Education for Persons with Disabilities Act to “guarantee the right to education by life cycle”
Enactment of the Lifelong Education Act for Persons of Disabilities to “guarantee the right to lifelong education for the severely disabled”
Amendment of the Act on Promotion of Transportation Convenience for Persons with Disabilities to “eliminate discrimination among special transportation areas”
Amendment of the Housing Support for Underprivileged groups Act and enactment of the Housing Maintenance and Service Act to "institutionalize housing support"
Amendment of Act Guaranteeing Convenience Promotion of Persons with Disabilities to "make mandatory the installation of convenience facilities"
Amendment of Public Official Election Act to "guarantee the right to vote for persons with developmental disabilities"
Amendment of the Pension Act for Persons with Disabilities to "expand the number of disabled pensioners"
For more than 21 years, persons with disabilities in Korea have been fighting on the subway lines and in the streets because basic rights for the disabled have not been properly secured. It has been difficult to enact or reform bills on rights for the disabled. Even if they are enacted or revised they have not been enforced properly. This is because the Ministry of Strategy and Finance has continued to control and cut the rights of the disabled with a "budget." When it comes to the rights of persons with disabilities, government officials from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance and others who are quick to criticize the movement, respond by saying it is hard to secure the budget because they are working with a limited budget for Korea. However, this is not the case. It is not that Korea cannot guarantee the rights of the disabled because of its limited budget. Korea is the 10th largest economy in the OECD. However, Korea comes last among OECD countries when it comes to the budget that the government spends on the disabled. The truth is not that the Ministry of Strategy and Finance has no money, but that it has so far treated the severely disabled as a worthless "tax-bearing" group in a society centered on merit and competition. SADD has thus referred to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance as a Korean version of the T4 group in Nazi Germany, by comparing it to the T4 program in 1939, which declared that it "costs too much for one disbled person," and killed 300,000 people with disabilities. In the 2023 government budget, the budget for the rights of the disabled was reduced or frozen, and only the 5% increase in the minimum wage was enacted. However, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance is full of self-congratulatory praise, including subway advertisements, saying, "We have provided thick and tight support to the disabled and the socially disadvantaged." They are deceiving the disabled by exaggerating the increase in the budget. Rather, if the budget bill is passed as it is, it will be more difficult for the disabled to survive in Korea in 2023.
Therefore, SADD's "taking the subway at rush hour" is an act of disobedience toward a non-disabled-centered society, which does not guarantee the rights of the disabled as citizens as stipulated in the Constitution of the Republic of Korea. The responsibility lies with Korean politics and the government, who do not listen unless the disabled resort to screaming.
For a world where the disabled can properly move, be educated, work, and live independently in places other than institutionalized settings in Korea, SADD will be once again be "taking the subway at rush hour" every day from November 7th to fight for a budget for the rights of the disabled. The struggle of the people with disabilities can make people uncomfortable by causing delays from ten minutes to some hours, but the struggle will also create a society where no one is excluded, even the disabled, who have been trapped at home or forced to be locked up in institutions. Let us all join the people with disabilities movement in Korea that has been fighting to create a world where no one is excluded!