The court said the police violated the law when they banned a Pride parade scheduled for June 28. The permits for the march, which acts as the pinnacle of the Korean Queer Cultural Festival, we're originally denied by police after it reportedly conflicted with applications for events set to use the parade route.
This application process soon pitted LGBT activists and Christian conservatives against one another.
"We welcome the decision," Mr Kang Myeong Jin, chief of the Korea Queer Culture Festival told journalists. "The court has sent a message to the public that sexual minorities should also be guaranteed rights to speech as a member of a democratic society."
Last year’s march was disrupted when anti-LGBT activists lay down in the street in front of parade floats. Police also attempted to shut down the event by trying to revoke the march permits saying it was inappropriate to hold the event in light of the Seoul ferry disaster that killed more than 300 people two months earlier.
Organizers have projected more than 20,000 people will participate in the march, and the march’s opponents are likely to attempt to disrupt the event once more.
When the Queer Cultural Festival opened on June 9, participants were outnumbered by protestors holding signs with slogans like “Stop Same-Sex Marriage” and “Gays Out: Homosexuals have no human rights.”
But they face fervent and vocal opposition from conservative Christian groups who plan to stage a street march in protest.
Gay and transgender Koreans live largely under the radar in a country that remains deeply conservative about matters of sexual identity and where many still regard homosexuality as a foreign phenomenon.
