HRWF report on visiting the 95-year-old Chairman Lee Man-hee of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus. He is in pre-trial detention during an extreme heatwave, and asks whether Korean law’s supervised alternatives should now be used.
Thursday, 6 August 2026 at 2:00 pm. The detention-centre visiting room is a little more than four metres square. In front of us, a wall of double glass perhaps ten centimetres thick. Behind it, an equally small room. Within it, a guard at a small desk, and an old man already seated. He had heard we were coming – three human rights experts from Europe. We spoke through a microphone; his voice came back through a speaker that crackled and kept fading. We leaned forward for the whole ten minutes.
Chairman Lee Man-hee is 95! He has been held in pre-trial detention since 24 June.
I was joined by expert colleagues from CESNUR, Bitter Winter and CAP Liberté de Conscience. The rules were plain — no interviewing, no consulting, and no sending out messages he would give us. So we mostly listened to a man talking about his faith with an energy that clearly held him upright. Ten minutes through glass is not a medical examination. It is a witness statement, and I offer it as nothing more.
The question raised by this visit is therefore narrow but urgent: not whether Chairman Lee is guilty or innocent, but whether continued pre-trial detention of a 95-year-old defendant is necessary, proportionate, and safe when Korean law provides supervised alternatives.That question runs through the scenes that follow: the visit, the summers searing heat, the charges, the available safeguards in Korean law, and finally the request to the court.
The waiting room
Booking for an appointment at the detention center was simple, using the Ministry of Justice online service the day before and receiving an assigned time window. A passport is necessary to get in. Untried detainees may in principle be visited daily, a few people at a time. A visit may last only about ten minutes. We knew we were on the clock.
What no one usually describes is the waiting room outside the detention-centre visiting room. It is the room where families and visitors sit before being called in to meet an inmate for a few minutes through glass. Around us were men with tattoos and hard faces, elderly women holding plastic bags on their knees, and young women waiting alone. Nothing about the room was theatrical. It was ordinary, bureaucratic, and grey. Yet the weight of it was visible when some visitors came back out with tears in their eyes.
The heat
The physical conditions matter, because this was no ordinary summer day. It was 39 °C, the fifth-highest reading in Seoul’s history, and the city was under the first “severe heatwave warning” ever issued for the whole of the capital. Nor was it an isolated peak. Since Chairman Lee’s arrest on 24 June, Seoul has passed through the most oppressive summer it has ever recorded: twelve days at or above 33 °C and twenty nights on which the temperature never fell below 25 °C. Korean media have begun calling them “super tropical nights.” Throughout the day, our phones sounded with emergency public safety alerts telling citizens to remain indoors and drink plenty of fluids.
That matters more than a visitor might guess, because Korean holding cells are generally not air-conditioned. Rumor has it that once in a while some fans were turned on for short periods of time.
Now put a nonagenarian into that arithmetic. Old bodies handle heat badly. They sweat less. They drink less. And they feel heat less accurately, so they overheat before they notice it. Prolonged heat then strains the kidneys and the heart, which is why heatwaves kill the very old first. What normally protects them is the cool of the night, and this month there was none. Shincheonji says Chairman Lee requires constant daily medical support. No independent medical assessment of him has been published — a gap any court would want closed before deciding anything.
The charges
The factual background is straightforward. Chairman Lee is accused of directing the enrolment of 56,472 followers into the People Power Party between 2021 and 2024. He ischarged under the Political Parties Act and with obstruction of business. The warrant of 24 June cited risk of destruction of evidence. A review of the detention’s legality was dismissed on 28 June. He was indicted on 29 June and again on 13 July; and trial opened on 24 July.
These are non-violent offences, and the contested question is not whether members joined a party — that is lawful — but whether they were compelled to. The church denies compulsion. There has been no conviction.
Scholars have expressed sharper concerns. In Rome on 3 July, Dr. Massimo Introvigne noted that EU states jail those over 80 only exceptionally and for violent crime: “Here, of course, there are no blood crimes, and the accusations are violations of electoral law”. He has since described the charges as “legally and conceptually overstretched“.
Separately, the day after the first indictment, the Minister of Justice publicly stated that “strict criminal punishment corresponding to its responsibility is inevitable,” placing the statement against a religious backdrop and quoting the Bible (Matthew 7:15). Whatever the prosecution’s merits, such statements make it harder for a Korean court to be seen to decide freely.
HRWF’s position is narrower. We take no view on whether the Political Parties Act was broken; that is for Korean judges applying Korean law, and their independence is something we defend rather than something we would influence. We ask one question, the one now before the court: whether continued detention, rather than a supervised alternative, is necessary.
The international standards
This is precisely what international prison standards are meant to test. Detention is not only a legal status; it is also a physical condition the State must be able to justify, supervise and keep safe.
The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners — the Mandela Rules —are the agreed global benchmark. They require respect for each prisoner’s inherent dignity, healthy accommodation with adequate air, space, heating and ventilation, and health care comparable to that available in the community. They also require medical examination and continuing treatment, with particular attention to vulnerable prisoners, including the very old.
The Tokyo Rules point in the same direction: pre-trial detention is a last resort where other measures can secure the proceedings. That does not mean an old man may never be detained. It means detention must be necessary, and his health must be protected if it is.
The domestic legal question is therefore whether Korea must keep him in a cell to secure the proceedings, or whether its own safeguards can meet the same purpose with less risk.
Korean law already has alternatives
Detention after indictment runs two months, renewable only twice (Criminal Procedure Act, Art. 92). Article 95 requires bail unless one of five exceptions applies, the first being offences punishable by more than ten years; obstruction of business carries five years, Political Parties Act offences less. Article 101 permits suspension of detention under supervision or with restriction of dwelling — house arrest in all but name.
Korean courts have already reasoned this way in this man’s own case. On 12 November 2020, the Suwon District Court granted Chairman Lee, then 89, bail on electronic monitoring, residence restriction and a deposit. The court found that evidence-gathering had progressed far enough to reduce the risk of destruction of evidence, that the elderly defendant’s health had deteriorated in detention, and that he had attended trial faithfully, according to KyeonginIlbo.
Hak Ja Han Moon, 83, has had her detention suspended on medical grounds repeatedly through 2026, most recently to 2 September, returning to custody whenever a suspension lapsed. These are conditional, revocable measures, not impunity.
The car park
When we arrived at the prison grounds, we parked near two very different forms of presence. In one corner, supporters of the former President held in the same facility had set up with music from a loudspeaker.
Nearby, a tent had been set up with a dozen chairs, all turned toward the block where Chairman Lee is believed to be held. Inside, men and women sat, praying in silence, eyes closed, some with their faces covered by their hands. Even as we approached, they did not turn to greet us; their attention remained fixed on the building. They were followers of Chairman Lee.
What we ask
On 21 August a court is expected to take up whether Chairman Lee will continue to await in a cell the court decision about his pretrial detention or in alternative place where he can be cared for. The timing is not arbitrary: two months from his 29 June indictment falls at the end of August, the point at which the Criminal Procedure Act requires detention to be reconsidered rather than assumed.
We do not ask the court to acquit him, to hurry, or to treat a religious leader more gently than a company director.
We ask three narrower things.
First, that the need for continued custody be assessed individually, based on independent medical evidence about his condition, not simply on the seriousness of the accusation.
Second, that the court publish the reasoning behind its decision for transparency’s sake, so that the public can see that it was based on judicial considerations, not political ones.
Third, if custody is not strictly necessary, that the court use the alternatives provided by Korean law — as it did for this same defendant in 2020.
We ask this publicly, and we personally handed a written petition to the government day after our visit.
That is what the Mandela Rules ask of every state, and it is the standard by which every judiciary would wish to be measured.
A court that visibly applies it to the oldest man in its custody does not look weaker for it. It looks like a court.
The test is not whether Chairman Lee is popular, orthodox, or innocent. It is whether a democratic state can justify keeping a 95-year-old unconvicted defendant in a cell when its own law provides a safe, supervised alternative.
HRWF takes no position on the guilt or innocence of any defendant in this case, nor on the doctrines of Shincheonji.
Further reading about FORB in this country on HRWF website
