What if a soldier insults his superior in a group chat room? Insulting the superior [Supreme Court August 19, 2021, Sentence, 2020 Do 14576, Judgment]

It's a matter of fact.
This case is a case in which a non-commissioned officer trainee was accused of insulting his superior who was a lecturer in a group chat room used with his colleagues. The defendants, who were cleaning the bathroom, appear to have been caught gossiping about the instructor who pointed it out in a group chat room when they saw water in the bathhouse at a time when it was difficult to remove water due to moisture. The defendant was accused of insulting his superior for nothing by posting a message to the trainees in charge of cleaning the bathhouse, saying, "Dorai, it's too humid." Accordingly, the lower court found the above expression guilty of misunderstanding the legal principles on the grounds of fragmenting the illegality of the crime of defamation because it does not constitute a legitimate act under Article 20 of the Criminal Act. In other words, the lower court judged that the defendant's insult to his boss in the group chat was not a self-defense act against his boss, so there was no reason for the insult to be established.

There are several precedents. The victim ordered 11 trainees, including the defendant, to clean the bathhouse from July 21, 2019 to 28th of the same month, entered the bathhouse to check if the socks were wet during the above period, and imposed a total of 25 negligence points on the defendant for poor water removal. The defendant was also restricted from going out and staying out overnight due to accumulated negligence scores.

Acts under Article 20 of the Criminal Act (justifiable law), acts for business reasons, or other acts that do not violate social norms shall not be punished.

a written judgment
Whether a crime is established or not must meet the requirements set by the relevant law. The case focused on whether one of the requirements for contempt of correlation, the act of contempt of correlation, was established. Insulting a superior is when a soldier makes insulting remarks and actions to his superior. In this case, legal interests protecting the freedom of expression of soldiers and the maintenance of military order and control systems conflict. In order to reconcile this, specific judgments are needed for each situation. In this case, the defendant admitted to insulting his superior, but this was his mistake, apparently in a space where other trainees expressed irrationality. In addition, this remark did not take up much of the overall conversation, and recently, considering that it is an expression that is used relatively often in everyday life, it resulted in harmonizing freedom of expression and military order.

The importance of precedent.
This case dealt with the conflict between contempt and freedom of expression, and the point was that it was important to find legal harmony between freedom of expression and contempt. Therefore, this precedent emphasized that if the expression can be viewed as an act that does not violate social norms, the illegality will not be sculpted as a legitimate act under Article 20 of the Criminal Act. It also stipulated that when applying the crime of contempt of superiority under the Military Criminal Act, the basic rights should be judged to be properly harmonized. Therefore, as a result of comprehensive consideration of these circumstances, it was determined that the remarks did not violate social norms and did not meet the requirements for establishing the crime of contempt of correlation. This ruling is meaningful in terms of protecting military freedom of expression while maintaining military order and control.