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

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.