The Supreme Court of South Korea opened up its courtroom to live television for the first time Thursday.

Considering the murky image that many South Koreans have of their judiciary and the positive effect live courtroom television has for transparency and fairness, this is an encouraging development for democracy and for judicial legitimacy in South Korea.

Unfortunately rather than airing one of the many cases of corruption between politicians and the chaebol or any one of hundreds of cases involving solely South Korean litigants, the court chose to air a case involving a Korean husband and his allegedly wayward Vietnamese wife.

Perhaps the court innocently considered that this would attract the greatest number of viewers. Perhaps the court thought that this case would stimulate the prurient interest of the public. However, in addition to revealing the court’s apparently dim view of the average South Korean television viewer, this choice merely fed into the ongoing racist and misogynistic narrative against Southeast Asian women in South Korea.

This narrative, which usually involves apocryphal tales of deceitful women from Southeast Asia trapping poor Korean men, should have had no place in the courtroom of the highest court in the nation.

How much better would it have been if the court had chosen to air a case centering on past atrocities committed by former dictators or strongmen? Surely the court could have found a case involving the bribery of a prosecutor or the financial misdealing of a chaebol member to air as its first case.

Should not the role of the judiciary be to raise the level of discourse in a society? One wonders why the chief justice thought that a case involving the alleged fleeing of an immigrant woman with her child, most likely to escape an abusive husband, would help the average citizen to gain a greater understanding of democracy?

It is far more likely that those viewing this broadcast only hardened their xenophobic feelings about these migrant women. The proverbial water cooler gossip last Friday clearly would have been focused on South Koreans confirming to each other that such international marriages were only a source of trouble and not any rational discussion about courtroom process, family law or how the judiciary contributes to the democratic process.

When occasionally a member of the so-called fourth branch of government, the media, broadcasts a biased report or a xenophobic story one can chalk it up to extremist elements. After all, those television producers who choose these stories make their decisions based on attracting the greatest number of viewers by generating controversy.

Even in 2008, and again in 2010, when members of the South Korean media portrayed the Cambodian ban on marriages to South Korean men as a South Korean-led initiative to protect Korean society one could dismiss such biased reporting as an unfortunate case of denial.

And in 2009 when three South Korean men were arrested for the rape and attempted gang rape of an unconscious 18-year-old Cambodian woman at a karaoke club, the focus of the South Korean media on the reputation of the young woman was unfortunate but again was a small part of the narrative.

In April of 2012 when Jasmine Lee, a marriage migrant, was elected to the National Assembly, the racist comments of a small minority were easy to disregard in the joyousness of the moment.

Even later in 2012 when MBC, one of the major television channels in South Korea, broadcast a racist piece about Korean women dating foreign men, one could ignore it as the efforts of a small fringe element in South Korean society.

However, when the Supreme Court of South Korea, the third branch of the South Korean government, chooses to add to the rampant xenophobia against outsiders in such a transparent manner, one can no longer dismiss such racism as a fringe part of South Korean society.

The unfortunate truth is that despite the extensive efforts of the South Korean government to create a multicultural society, many South Koreans, even at the highest levels, continue to hold racist views and to discriminate against non-ethnic Koreans on a daily basis. It is highly likely that the members of the Supreme Court never even considered how their choice might affect the average marriage migrant in South Korea.

Thus this last week the Supreme Court only added fuel to the xenophobic fire by choosing to air, as their very first televised case, one in which a Southeast Asian marriage migrant fled with her child, quite possibly to avoid the South Korean judicial system in the first place.

The court thus missed a chance to raise the level of discourse in South Korea and once again demonstrated the ultimate irrelevance of the South Korean judiciary in crafting an advanced society in South Korea.

By Daniel Fiedler

Daniel Fiedler has been a professor of law in South Korea since 2006 and a licensed attorney in California since 2000 and Arizona since 1998. ― Ed.