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Prosecutor-General Yoon Seok-youl and Cho Kuk, then senior presidential secretary for civil affairs, at the Blue House on July 25. (Kim Jung-hyo, staff photographer)
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A look into the fierce battle between the justice minister and the prosecutor-general
Despite expectations that the campaign to reform South Korea’s prosecutorial system would not get underway until after the prosecutors wrap up their investigation into Justice Minister Cho Kuk, that campaign became a prominent issue this week. The fuse was lit by a candlelight protest in Seoul’s Seocho neighborhood last Saturday, on Sept. 28, that protest organizers estimate was attended by 1 million people. On Sept. 30, two days after the protest, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who had hitherto stood on the sidelines of Cho’s investigation, ordered Prosecutor-General Yoon Seok-youl to “quickly devise measures to ensure public trust of our law enforcement agencies.” The next day, Yoon reported an internal reform plan that would reduce the number of special investigations divisions around the country to three. Not to be outdone, the ruling Democratic Party then proposed its own plan that would shrink the total number of prosecutors around the country that conduct independent investigations to several dozen. The person who is most zealous to reform the prosecutors is Cho himself, the target of their current investigation. After taking office on Sept. 9 as the first justice minister in modern Korean history to be investigated by prosecutors, Cho used his inaugural remarks to promise to “irreversibly” reform the prosecutors, who “possess great authority without [being subject to] any mechanisms of control.” The first order that Cho gave was to set up the “2nd Prosecutorial Reform Action Committee”; two days later, he gave orders to strengthen internal audits of the prosecutors. Since then, Cho has been holding dialogue sessions with prosecutors and investigators and has been concentrating on reform measures that can prevent information about official suspects from being leaked to the press. While it’s rather awkward for a justice minister who is being investigated by the prosecutors to be loudly crying for prosecutorial reform, Cho is compelled to make a strong showing, if only to prove that his presence means something. Even Yoon, the very person who gave the go-ahead for Cho’s investigation, is being forced to go along with prosecutorial reform. While some of that impetus stems from Moon’s orders, Yoon has no choice but to comply with reform if he is to protect the legitimacy of the investigation into Cho, an investigation that Yoon himself launched. Yoon needs to distance himself from accusations that the investigation into Cho had the political goal of torpedoing prosecutorial reform. So Yoon proposed the idea of immediately reducing the number of prosecutorial offices around the country with a special investigations division from seven to three. While some maintain that three offices would still be adequate for the prosecutor-general to investigate matters of interest, that must have been a tough decision for a prosecutor who has spent his entire career in special investigations. Ironically, it was the prosecutors’ investigation of Cho that has helped the long-stalled campaign of prosecutorial reform gain some traction. Cho is going to keep pushing for reform, and Yoon will find himself under pressure to cooperate from lawmakers during the upcoming parliamentary audit of his organization. This can be seen as an unexpected fringe benefit of the investigation into Cho. But it’s worth asking whether the current proposals will actually achieve the desired ends. The recent push to curtail the prosecutors’ ability to conduct its own investigations is rather different from the prosecutorial reform plans previously advanced by the Moon administration, and more specifically by Cho Kuk himself, while he was serving as Moon’s senior secretary for civil affairs. Moon’s original pledge was to separate the powers of investigation and indictment so as to create a systems of checks and balances between the prosecutors and police. According to this plan, the police would conduct the investigations and the prosecutors would review their findings and decide whether to take the case to trial. The goal of this plan is to eliminate the political motivations and undue leniency that can crop up when the prosecutors handle both the investigation and the indictments. National Assembly choose to let prosecutors conduct own investigationsns But the prosecutorial reform plan that the government and ruling party fast-tracked in the National Assembly at the end of April preserves the prosecutors’ ability to conduct its own investigations while reducing the prosecutors’ authority to direct police investigations. That legislation differs from both the original plan and from Cho’s current plan to shrink the special investigations divisions (which conduct the prosecutors’ independent investigations) and to expand the criminal division (which has the authority to oversee police investigations). While the Blue House justifies this on the grounds that the police’s capacity for investigations still doesn’t rival that of the prosecutors, the government also seems to have been impressed by the dirt that special investigations prosecutors managed to dig up about former presidents Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Seung-tae. In short, the government is hesitant to lose the prosecutors’ aptitude with investigations. What happens if the prosecutors’ authority over police investigations is weakened and the prosecutors’ ability to carry out independent investigations is reduced? It’s hard to say for sure, but the results are unlikely to be very positive. The investigation into Cho has pushed prosecutorial reform forward at breakneck speed; now it’s time for the advocates of reform to take a breather and make sure they’re moving in the right direction. We also need to think carefully about a plan announced by the prosecutors on Oct. 4 to do away with the practice of public summonses. When Cho’s wife Chung Kyung-sim, a professor at Dongyang University, was privately summoned to the prosecutors on Oct. 3, there were complaints that she’d received special treatment, which prompted Yoon to announce the next day that public summonses were being ended for all official suspects. It has been the custom at the prosecutors to alert the press when public figures, such as senior government officials, lawmakers, and the presidents of large corporations, are called in for questioning — something that doesn’t happen with private citizens — but Yoon said that such information will no longer be provided. While this is a desirable step in terms of protecting human rights, it’s also sure to be welcomed by those who seek to abuse their authority to engage in corruption. By Choi Hyun-june, staff reporter Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
