Korea has made several attempts to reform the prosecution. Key tasks of the prosecutorial reform are to maintain political neutrality of the prosecution and come up with measures to distribute and monitor the authority of the prosecution. The backgrou...
Korea has made several attempts to reform the prosecution. Key tasks of the prosecutorial reform are to maintain political neutrality of the prosecution and come up with measures to distribute and monitor the authority of the prosecution. The background of the prosecutorial reform has been always involved in power-related corruption cases. The corruption of high-ranking officials, namely people in authority, is called ‘power-related corruption’ which can cause a national crisis because of its huge impact on our society. In the past, the collusion between politics and business was typical, and it was particularly customary for astronomical amounts of money to be used for presidential elections. As such, power was quite interchangeable with wealth, and a democratic political system is bound to conflict with a capitalist economic system, which led politicians to turn away from the interests of the public and serve business leaders with economic power and eventually caused a crisis of democracy. This is why claims for the establishment of ‘Criminal Investigation Agency of High-Ranking Officials (hereinafter referred to as ‘CIAHO’)’ have been stronger. It is also because there has been criticism of the prosecution that does not observe neutrality, fairness, and objectivity in ‘power-related corruption’ cases in terms of ‘biased investigation, targeted investigation, easy-going investigation, protecting its own members, and overlooking chaebol’s corruption’, and there has been the necessity of an independent investigation agency such as CIAHO as an institutional device to check and control abusive exercises of the prosecution’s powerful authority (investigative rights, right to request a warrant, executive power, right to prosecute, exclusive right to prosecute, discretionary power to prosecute, etc.).
The introduction, Chapter I. of this thesis, briefly deals with the necessity, the purpose, scopes and methods of study and in Chapter II. it discusses the significance and the direction of the prosecutorial reform. Section 1 of Chapter II. handles the need to reform the prosecution. Given prosecutors in Korea have mighty power, it is abuse of the prosecutorial power when the prosecution determines a non-prosecution disposition in its investigation into a corruption case, as a result of political influence, or when an innocent man is indicted on a false charge. This leads to violate a basic right of the people and can harm the basis of a liberal democracy based on sovereignty of the people. Nevertheless, the prosecution has seized the major power in Korea, and since the removal of this negative effect depends on the prosecutorial reform, its necessity has been emphasized. The prosecutorial reform was first attempted under ‘the People’s Government’ of President Kim Dae-jung, but it had little progress and failed to institutionalize. Afterward, more outcomes were achieved during ‘the Participatory Government’ of President Noh Moo-hyun, compared to ‘the People's Government’ years. The result was a measure to control the power of the prosecution and secure its political independence. However, it failed to purify the power, establish a system to distribute and control it, and break the chain of collusion between politics and prosecution. During the past 20 years of democratization to achieve a constitutional government with legal grounds, the prosecutorial power has been paradoxically grown to be on par with the administration, and this bloated power of the prosecution has started to expose problems, leading to abuse of its authority.
In Section 2, it deals with the direction of the prosecutorial reform. It explores measures to eliminate the risk that the prosecutorial power undermines the foundation of democracy. In other words, it looks into the way to apply external control for the prosecution empowerment and control and mitigate the power expansion by distributing and reducing the authority. Since the prosecutorial power directly affects the violation of basic human rights, it should be controlled objectively, fairly, and transparently to protect life and liberty. The first measure for this is external control over the prosecutorial power. This approves the existing prosecutorial authority, rather than reforming the prosecutorial structure itself, and compensates the defect by placing an external device controlling for the prosecution not to abuse its authority. The second measure is to distribute its authority. This means the distribution of some of its enormous authority to another agency. In the past, the prosecution served the political power of the military government, which accordingly created the concept of ‘Uniformity of Public Prosecutors’ and since then, after democratization, have been looking for a way to live together with the capital power, which created the challenge to clear up past affairs. Yet, since there were few other state organizations that monitored or held it in check, the solution to these problems is to distribute its authority, monitor, and control it by decentralizing its consolidated power. The key task related to this external control and the empowerment is definitely ‘political neutrality’. In Section 2, it explores measures for this neutrality and identifies the issues associated with this political neutrality.
In Section 3, it discusses the concept and the state of corruption·irregularity of high-ranking officials which become the cause of the prosecutorial reform. It looks into the significance, scopes, the concept, and types of high-ranking officials’ corruption and briefly discusses the way to understand the state of corruption·irregularity of high-ranking officials. Then, it briefly presents the problems related to the corruption·irregularity of high-ranking officials and the right direction of improvement plans.
In Chapter III. it discusses foreign cases to understand corruption investigation agencies of public officials and their authority in selected countries. In case of overseas investigation agencies, they have different organizational positions and forms depending on their own ‘legal tradition’ and ‘sociocultural characteristics’. However, independent investigation agencies in other countries have common ground with Korea, which is that they also started from distrust of the political sphere and the administration and tried to protect a basic right of the people and secure fairness and neutrality with professional expertise by installing a body independent from political influence. In Chapter III., it first looks into legal traditions or criminal justice backgrounds of each country. Then, it divides the investigation agencies by a legal system of the country between the Continental law system and the Common law system for further discussion. Finally, it draws up the future direction of CIAHO by comparing to the Korean equivalent. Furthermore, it studies critical views of overseas investigation agencies and appropriateness of comparisons with the Korean body in terms of the comparative method to indicate the validity of measuring success and failure of CIAHO.
In Chapter IV. it describes the establishment of the independent body investigating corruption cases of high-ranking officials. In Section 1 of this chapter, it explores the roles of previous corruption investigation agencies: ‘the Central Investigation Division at the Prosecutor-General's Office, Anti-Corruption Commission {Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption}, the Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission’, and whether they were successful or not. In Section 2, it discusses current status, importance, suitability in constitutional contexts, etc. of Independent Counsel that is the existing independent special investigation agency in Korea. Then, it studies the problems associated with temporary Independent Counsel and permanent Independent Counsel respectively. Finally, it describes the limitations and problems of temporary Independent Counsel and permanent Independent Counsel that have been in effect so far, the newly suggested measure of CIAHO, and the plan to secure the effectiveness of this agency. In Section 3, it discusses the legislative process of establishing the independent investigation agency, namely CIAHO and its advantages and disadvantages. It reviews the historical conditions of the legislative process of the CIAHO bill and the issues associated with the discussion of adopting it that include both a supporting argument and an opposing argument. In Section 4, it reviews and compares the legislative proposal and the petitions for legislation to establish CIAHO that were submitted to the National Assembly in 2017. The latest proposals in 2017 that are 「Committee Measures」suggested by ‘Committee for Reformation of the Ministry of Justice and Prosecution Service’ and「Ministry of Justice Measures」, MOJ’s own plans, are divided into subcategories for a further description: ‘size, authority, limitation on authority, jurisdiction, jurisdictional competition, composition’. In Section 5, it suggests the supplementary measures to establish CIAHO. First, these are separated into a plan to establish by law based on the legal review of CIAHO and a plan to establish by amending the constitution to compare the responsible organizations for each plan and the related problems, and then, it discusses how efforts are made to secure its legal status from the formation of social consensus.
The conclusion, Chapter V. looks into the value of a state existing to protect its people having the sovereign power and the value of laws existing to protect human dignity. It starts with law enforcement that should be carefully carried out as ‘the last resort’ to realize justice and points out the correlation between human rights and the loss of fairness · objectivity · transparency and political neutrality for abuse of the prosecutorial power. Human rights, the core of the constitution and human values that the international community including the United Nations is trying to protect all together, should be definitely protected by the prosecution, and when this rule is not observed, it eventually leads to services and favors for people in authority and holders of money power, which creates harmful consequences of corruption and irregularity. The conclusion deals with efforts to resolve these bad effects, and then claims that the people’s voice in activities of the prosecution should be first reflected and their active and direct participation should be ensured. This thesis is finalized by the certainty of national development with the increase of national strength that is resulted from the people served by the power, who can be accordingly devoted to their roles as owners of a democratic country with the support of naturally enhanced national competitiveness, when the public, the high-ranking officials, and the prosecution break their distrust and build up trust in one another and CIAHO pulls its weight as the criminal investigation agency.