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The Quality of Democracy in Korea pp 73–120Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Democratic Quality and the Rule of Law in South Korea: The Role of Public Prosecution

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Part of the book series: Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific ((CSAP))

Abstract

This chapter investigates the quality of public prosecution with regard to its role in maintaining and developing the rule of law in South Korea. The rule of law is a crucial dimension of democratic quality because it provides the basic codes of conduct for human interaction in a given society. This is true not only for law itself and its supremacy, but also for the making and the application of laws. The present study adopts a qualitative approach to the quality of democracy. The author’s basic contention is that sound prosecution is crucial for a democratic rule of law; in turn, only a democratic rule of law can ensure a qualitatively sound democracy. In order to analyze the nature of state prosecution and the role it plays in affecting the quality of democracy, this chapter first develops a set of criteria used for analyzing the quality of democracy. This list of criteria will then serve as a basis for scrutinizing the state of the quality of the prosecution. In the conclusion, the author presents the findings that he maintains will help to elucidate the state of Korea’s quality of democracy through the lens of the rule of law. While there is an abundance of literature on the quality of democracy, the rule of law, and prosecution in Korea after democratization respectively, research on these issues has not, so far, put the rule of law in the systematic context of Korea’s quality of democracy. Against this backdrop, the present study, while focusing only on the prosecution, is a complementary contribution to the existing literature on the Korean case as well as to the comparative literature more generally.

Prosecutors are creating the free and democratic world in which everybody wants to live, based on principles, clear judgment, rationality, and humanity. (Supreme Prosecutor’s Office 2015 )

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Freedom House Freedom of the World index surveys the rule of law using the following four main questions: Is there an independent judiciary ? Does the rule of law prevail in civil and criminal matters? Are police under direct civilian control? Is there protection from political terror, unjustified imprisonment, exile, or torture, whether by groups that support or oppose the system? Is there freedom from war and insurgences? Do law, policies, and practices guarantee equal treatment of various segments of the population? (cf. FH 2015).

  2. 2.

    In contrast to the FH and the BTI that draw on experts—mostly political scientists—the GCR surveys “top management business leaders” for its assessment (Global Competitiveness Report 2016).

  3. 3.

    The index is based on combined data from a general population poll and a series of qualified respondents’ questionnaires involving roughly 100,000 ordinary citizens and in-country professionals in around 100 included countries.

  4. 4.

    The preceding RLI reports had 72% in 2010, 71% in 2011, 76% in 2012/13, 77% in 2014, and 79% in 2015 (see RLI each year).

  5. 5.

    For comparison, Germany ranks sixth with a score of 83%, Denmark ranks first with 89%, and Uruguay ranks twentieth with 72%.

  6. 6.

    The main eight categories of the RLI are constraints on government powers, the absence of corruption , open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, and criminal justice. Each of these main factors is then further divided into three to eight subfactors. There are only detailed numbers on all subfactors for the time period between 2011 and 2013 (reports were published in 2013 and 2014, respectively). The selection of the five factors is based on the average scores from the most recent reports.

  7. 7.

    “Corruption of the legislature” and “unreasonable delay of civil justice” were placed on ranks four and five of the weakest points of the rule of law in recent years.

  8. 8.

    These will be introduced beneath in detail in respect to related norms.

  9. 9.

    Here, translation depicts a kind of cultural translation and is supposed to express in this context that it was not just a transplantation or imposition, but an active appropriation of initial ideas of the ideas and conception on which the prosecutorial institution was based. For more details on the concept of translation, see Lee and Mosler (2015).

  10. 10.

    The German prosecutorial institution was itself modeled after the French system (cf. Schubtert 1981). Originally, the prosecutor system was introduced for the first time in France after the French Revolution. The idea was to devolve power that used to be vested in the judges. By inserting an additional layer or agent into the legal process, the principle of checks and balances was implemented. This developed into the two modern systems: inquisitorial (or non-adversarial; e.g., in civil legal systems such as Germany and France) and adversarial (or adversary; e.g., in common law systems such as the United States and Great Britain) systems.

  11. 11.

    See the following sections for detailed explanations.

  12. 12.

    We find a more detailed refinement of these aspects in the UN documents mentioned above.

  13. 13.

    The top-down chain of command regulation was substituted with the right of the superior to direct and supervise subordinates, and newly added to the regulations was that prosecutors have the right to raise objections, in addition to strengthening responsibility through the introduction of a principle according to which decisions have to be put down in writing.

  14. 14.

    The top prosecutor post had been vacant for almost half a year because the preceding prosecutor-general had to step down due to various scandals within the prosecution including sex and other forms of bribes (Chang 2013).

  15. 15.

    Prosecutors come from certain high schools, are mostly graduates from SNU, Korea University, or Yonsei University, and have majored in law. They also complete a two-year term with their peers at the judicial training center before they enter prosecution.

  16. 16.

    However, later due to protests against this result, a special investigation team of the prosecution was mandated to investigate the case again. The prosecutor was found guilty and received a penalty of two years and six months imprisonment.

  17. 17.

    Ultimately, in 2015, the Supreme Court upheld the second instance’s decision, which had overturned the court’s verdict imposing three years of imprisonment and acquitted the prosecutor of all charges.

  18. 18.

    While the survey does not distinguish between police and prosecution, it still bears significance since the prosecutor supervises the entire process of investigation.

  19. 19.

    While there were only five such cases in 2010, there were 14 suicides in 2011, 10 and 11 in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and 21 suicides in 2014. Since June 2015, 15 suicides have already taken place (Yun 2015).

  20. 20.

    The number of such cases rose to 904 in 2012 and then to 1035 in 2013 (Yun 2015).

  21. 21.

    In only 184 out of the analyzed 462 total cases, an appeal was possible because the Constitutional Court had decided in the other cases on the unconstitutionality of the verdicts’ legal basis. Out of the 184 cases, the prosecution appealed in 92 cases (see Chŏng 2014).

  22. 22.

    The report commissioned by the public prosecution itself was completed in March 2010 by in-depth interviews of 1000 citizens and 1403 civil servants working for the public prosecution, such as prosecutors and common civil servants, and 20 experts (2011).

  23. 23.

    In 2009, 47.1%, and in 2010, 41.5% said they distrusted the public prosecution (Ko 2012; Yi 2010a, b).

  24. 24.

    The survey was conducted for four days between August 5 and 8, 2013 by interviewing 1200 citizens via automated answering random digit dialing phone calls (East Asia Institute 2015).

  25. 25.

    The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs is affiliated with the state-run National Research Council for Economics, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

  26. 26.

    The survey was conducted in June and August 2014 by way of nationwide face-to-face interviews of 3648 adult Korean citizens older than 19 and younger than 76 years (Kim 2014a, b, 40).

  27. 27.

    The survey was conducted by the private polling agency Realmeter on August 25–26, 2014, by interviewing 1000 citizens via automated answering random digit dialing phone calls (Kyunghyang Sinmun 2014).

  28. 28.

    This survey was conducted by the Korean Society Opinion Institute on September 4, 2014, asking 700 citizens by way of random digit dialing and computer-assisted telephone interviewing (Choi 2014).

  29. 29.

    This survey was conducted between September and October 2015 by interviewing 1000 citizens older than 20 years in various Korean provinces and cities (Kim 2016).

  30. 30.

    This survey is conducted every year by interviewing 7500 citizens who are between 19 and 69 years old (Statistics Korea 2016).

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  1. Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Hannes B. Mosler

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  1. Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Hannes B. Mosler

  2. Institute of Korean Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Eun-Jeung Lee

  3. Institute for Peace and Unification Studies, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Hak-Jae Kim

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Mosler, H.B. (2018). Democratic Quality and the Rule of Law in South Korea: The Role of Public Prosecution. In: Mosler, H., Lee, EJ., Kim, HJ. (eds) The Quality of Democracy in Korea. Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63919-2_4

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