This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 1 November 2018, South Korea's Supreme Court ruled nine to four that conscientious objection to military service is a justifiable ground for refusal rather than a crime. The ruling overturned the court's own 2004 position and ended a practice that had sent more than eighteen thousand Jehovah's Witnesses to prison since the Korean War, South Korea being responsible for the large majority of the world's conscientious objector imprisonments.
The court did not act alone. A June 2018 Constitutional Court ruling had already ordered the government to create an alternative civilian service by December 2019, so the Supreme Court's November decision followed a constitutional finding that the existing system could not continue unchanged.
The practical effect followed within months. Sixty five Witnesses still held in prison were released in the ruling's wake, the last of them on 28 February 2019, ending the imprisonment of Jehovah's Witnesses in South Korea for conscientious objection entirely, after more than six decades of continuous practice.
What the 2018 rulings changed for the Jehovah's Witnesses in South Korea was closing a sixty five year record of imprisonment in the space of a single court term, converting a country that had jailed more conscientious objectors than any other into one building a civilian alternative for the belief it had spent decades punishing.