Contesting South Korea's Legal Legacy: Prosecution Reform and Democratization

There are few issues as contentious in modern South Korea as reform of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, the country’s highest investigative authority. Over the past several years, feuds over the direction of the prosecution have at times completely dominated political discourse. President Moon Jae-in has spent a considerable amount of political capital on prosecution reform (kŏmch'al kaehyŏk) since his election in 2017, and bitter battles on multiple fronts erupted over the president’s drive to remove power from the prosecution and shift it to different institutions. The cornerstone of these reforms finally passed the legislature in 2020 after decades of effort from civic groups and politicians. High-profile debates over the future of the prosecution elevated former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl to a top presidential contender, despite never having held elected office. This thesis takes the following as its central question – why has prosecution reform become associated with the...Show moreThere are few issues as contentious in modern South Korea as reform of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, the country’s highest investigative authority. Over the past several years, feuds over the direction of the prosecution have at times completely dominated political discourse. President Moon Jae-in has spent a considerable amount of political capital on prosecution reform (kŏmch'al kaehyŏk) since his election in 2017, and bitter battles on multiple fronts erupted over the president’s drive to remove power from the prosecution and shift it to different institutions. The cornerstone of these reforms finally passed the legislature in 2020 after decades of effort from civic groups and politicians. High-profile debates over the future of the prosecution elevated former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl to a top presidential contender, despite never having held elected office. This thesis takes the following as its central question – why has prosecution reform become associated with the South Korean democratization and the political fault lines that emerged in its wake? It is an attempt to interrogate the motivations behind this quest for reform and situate it as part of a political and historical era – that is, the continued and contentious legacy of democratization and the transition to a more open civil society in the 1980s and 1990. This investigation will begin with a summary and analysis of the particular roles and responsibilities of the South Korean prosecution, as well as a brief overview of some of the existing literature. The first chapter will cover the prosecution’s history under Japanese rule, the American occupation, and the South Korean governments that followed the end of American rule in 1948. The institution’s historical formation is important to understanding the way the prosecution has been viewed by reformers in more recent years. The second chapter concerns the methods by which the prosecution was deployed during authoritarian rule, conflicts between the prosecution and legal activist groups, and the institutional continuity the prosecutor’s office displayed after the transition to democracy in 1987. The third chapter explores the ways through which the issue of prosecutorial reform has been framed, debated, in the context of changes in South Korean governance and society from the 1990s onward. The final chapter briefly discusses the successful implementation of reforms under the Moon Jae-in administration. This research draws on primary sources including newspaper archives from databases such as Naver News Library and the Korea Integrated Newspaper Database System, government and court case records, and documents from the civic organizations that first proposed sweeping changes to the country’s prosecution. This thesis is part history and part histography, as it charts the way the prosecution’s past has been interpreted to reorder its present powers. Ultimately, it is my hope that this investigation will shed a light on how an issue that has an enduring impact on modern South Korean politics came to be theorized and discussed as representing an unfinished legacy of democratization.Show less

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Contesting South Korea's Legal Legacy: Prosecution Reform and Democratization