Seoul activists plan to take to the streets in a very 21st century way after South Korea refused to allow anti-government protesters to demonstrate outside the presidential palace.
Members of Amnesty International Korea plan to call for greater freedom of speech and freedom of assembly by holding what they call a "ghost rally" on Feb. 24. They said they will project holographic images of people marching and chanting slogans in Gwanghwamun Square, one of Seoul's largest plazas.
"Our message to the government is to allow freedom of peaceful assembly near Cheong Wa Dae [the presidential palace], where rallies have been strictly banned since the Sewol ferry disaster," Byun Jeong-pil, the protest's campaign manager, told the Korea Times. "We wanted to gather physically to make our message heard, but it's impossible." Holograms, he said, are the alternative.
The organization invited supporters in an online appeal to send text messages and voice recordings, which will be used as picket phrases in the holographic rally, via popular messaging app KakaoTalk. It's unclear how the group plans to actually display the holograms.
A South Korean official told The Korea Herald that police denied permission to protest because they believed a rally would cause serious traffic and other disruption to the surrounding residential neighborhood.
The Park administration has come under fire in the past for its handling of protests.
Human rights activists and experts, including the United Nations Human Rights Council, have called on the government to relax curbs on freedom of speech and freedom of expression as police have cracked down on protests with violence.
Police in May used water cannons and pepper spray on protesters condemning the Park government's handling of the sinking of a South Korean ferry carrying hundreds of schoolchildren.
And in November, at least 30 people were injured when police fired tear gas and water cannons as some 80,000 protesters marched across Seoul, demanding Park's resignation for high youth unemployment and labor policies that allowed businesses to lay off workers more easily. One protester remains in a coma after being hit by water cannons that day, the Korea Times reported.
Amnesty International's ghost rally will be the world's second virtual protest, the human rights group said. In April, activists in Madrid projected holograms of some 2,000 people in front of the city's parliamentary building to protest against a new "gag law" that prohibited people from burning the Spanish national flag and protesting outside the parliament.
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