The Constitutional Court ruled on Thursday that the current law allowing retroactive enforcement of electronic anklets for convicted sex offenders is constitutional.

The court dismissed a petition filed by a district court against a controversial clause of a subsidiary law on putting electronic anklets on convicted sex offenders who are likely to repeat crimes after their release.

The monitoring system is “aimed at preventing repeat crimes by sex offenders and protecting the people from sex crimes,” the court said in its ruling, adding that the punishment does not fetter the ex-convicts.

South Korea first implemented a law on electronic monitoring in September 2008, and then passed a bylaw about two years later, when the nation was shaken up by a string of rapes of young girls by repeat sex offenders, to apply the law retroactively to offenders who were convicted before the original law went into effect in 2008.

The Cheongju District Court in August 2010 challenged the legality of the retroactive rule after it received a prosecution request to attach a device to a sex offender who was then soon to be released from prison. The court argued that retroactive application of the device is tantamount to punishing a convict twice for the same crime. (Yonhap News)