Prosecution Reform in South Korea: Elections, Independent Prosecutors, Expanded Police Powers, and Grand Juries

Abstract

Prosecutorial independence is a major political issue in South Korea. Ending prosecutorial politicization has been debated for decades and is understood as crucial for enhancing the quality of democracy. President Moon Jae-In has recently pushed through several changes. This paper explains Korea’s prosecutorial reform discourse and the new reforms. Reformists have argued that the centralized, bureaucratic nature of Korea’s prosecution system facilitates its top-down politicization. To remedy this, they have advocated for adopting measures to decentralize and even democratize the Prosecutors’ Office. From a comparative perspective, prosecution reform involves a clash of Continental European versus Anglo-American styles of prosecutorial organization. Reformers, disenchanted with the Continental tradition, have challenged the legitimacy of their German-Japanese derived system and looked to the common law tradition for solutions to prosecutorial independence problems. While not naive about the drawbacks of aspects of Anglo-American prosecutorial organization, they have welcomed ideas on decentralizing and democratizing the prosecution. That reformers are the ideological descendants of the democratization movement has encouraged such thinking. An unspoken dilemma of Korea’s prosecutorial reform saga has thus been: should reforms *improve* bureaucratic accountability or *introduce* democratic accountability? This paper explains Korea’s prosecution reforms relating to personnel management, investigations, and charging authority. It analyzes competing bureaucratizing and democratizing ideas, including new regulations, proposals for prosecutor elections, the establishment of the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials, the expansion of independent police investigative powers, and the adoption of the grand jury. This excerpt is taken from a working paper on prosecutorial independence in South Korea. The whole paper will be published in coming months.