A North Korean defector accused of helping others send money to their families in North Korea through unauthorized channels has been acquitted by a South Korean appeals court, a nongovernmental research group specializing in unification policy said Wednesday.
An appellate panel of the Uijeongbu District Court acquitted the 54-year-old defendant, who was charged in relation to 11 transfers made using the defendant’s bank account and an acquaintance’s account in China, according to the Unification Law and Policy Research Institute.
The ruling overturned a lower court decision last year that imposed a suspended fine of 1 million won ($671).
Prosecutors indicted the defendant on charges of violating the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, which requires overseas transfers to be made through authorized foreign exchange institutions.
Park Won-yeon, a lawyer who represented the defendant, told local media that the court found the defendant had not operated a foreign exchange business for profit and that the conduct therefore did not constitute an offense under the law.
Many North Korean defectors send part of their income to family members in North Korea. A 2023 survey by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights found that 63.5 percent of North Korean defectors had sent money to family members or acquaintances in the North at least once since arriving in South Korea.
The same survey found that brokers received an average of 48.1 percent of the transferred amount as commission for arranging the transfers.
Because direct legal transfers to recipients in North Korea are effectively unavailable, defectors often rely on brokers and bank accounts in South Korea and China to send money to their families.
Previous administrations had generally refrained from investigating family remittances by defectors when there were no suspected national security violations. A series of police investigations in 2023 and 2024, however, led to the prosecution of several defectors involved in such transfers.
Police stopped investigating simple family remittances in 2024, while defendants who had already been indicted continued to face trial.
On Nov. 28, 2025, the Seoul Northern District Court acquitted another North Korean defector accused of violating foreign exchange regulations while acting as a broker for family remittances to North Korea. It marked the first such acquittal by a South Korean court.
The defendant in that case argued that prosecutors had abused their prosecutorial authority, but the court rejected the claim. Prosecutors did not appeal, and the acquittal became final.
Tuesday’s ruling marked the second time a South Korean court had acquitted a North Korean defector in such a case.
minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com
