LONDON (BNO NEWS) -- Amnesty International on Thursday urged South Korean authorities to release a social media activist accused of helping "the enemy" for re-tweeting messages from a North Korean government Twitter account.

Park Jeonggeun, a 24-year-old Socialist Party activist, was charged earlier this week with violating the country's national security law for re-tweeting the message "long live Kim Jong-il" from North Korea's official Twitter account. Park, who says his re-tweets were meant to ridicule North Korea's leaders rather than support them, was detained on January 11 and could face up to seven years in jail.

"This is not a national security case, it's a sad case of the South Korean authorities' complete failure to understand sarcasm," said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Director. "Imprisoning anyone for peaceful expression of their opinions violates international law but in this case, the charges against Park Jeonggeun are simply ludicrous and should be dropped immediately."

Police have accused Park Jeonggeun of spreading North Korean propaganda. "My intention was to lampoon North Korea's leaders for a joke; I did it for fun," Park Jeonggeun told Amnesty International.

During South Korea's military rule in the 1970s and 80s, people were regularly imprisoned under the National Security Law, which makes it a crime to "praise" or sympathize with North Korea. Despite the end of military rule in South Korea, numerous arrests have been made under the NSL for "propagating or instigating a rebellion against the state."

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