Supreme Court clarifies liability for marriage brokers in ad violation case

The Supreme Court sent a criminal case involving illegal marriage brokerage advertisements back to a lower court, ruling that the registered corporate entity constitutes the primary business owner subject to penalty. Representatives and employees of such firms are not joint accomplices with the corporation but are liable as individual actors under specific dual punishment provisions.

The decision overturns an appellate ruling from the Uijeongbu District Court which had acquitted the company representative while convicting a team leader and staff member. Judges found the lower court misunderstood the legal relationship between the corporate business owner and the actual perpetrators who executed the prohibited conduct.

Central to the dispute was the transmission of data containing photographs and physical details of Vietnamese women to website subscribers via a messaging application. The court stated that the Marriage Brokerage Act limits its definition of a broker to the business owner who receives fees and profits from the matchmaking service.

When the registered operator is a corporation, the legal entity itself becomes the broker rather than its agents or workers. The dual punishment clause penalizes both the individual who committed the violation and the corporate entity that benefited from the illicit activity. This distinction exists because the law aims to ensure the effectiveness of penalties by extending liability to actual executors while holding the profit-attributing entity accountable, rather than treating them as co-conspirators under general criminal law principles.

The bench criticized the original trial for failing to clarify discrepancies between the charges filed by prosecutors and the legal articles applied during the proceedings. It instructed the lower court to request necessary explanations from the prosecution to ensure the defendant's right to a proper defense is protected before retrying the case.