The institutions Korea is spending down: Judiciary and Criminal Justice

Why it matters: Korea’s ruling camp is spending down institutional capital it did not build and cannot quickly rebuild — packing the Supreme Court on a compressed timetable while stripping the criminal justice system of its second look, just as the public discovers how little oversight the police actually face.

Judiciary: Mob Justice Is Justice, Too

After torpedoing the prosecution, the Minjoo crusaders are coming for the last bastion between them and Jerusalem: the Supreme Court.

Minjoo and the Blue House are blasting Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae for skipping the “customary” consultation with the president in nominating Supreme Court justices, even threatening impeachment.

President Lee Jae-myung’s administration is struggling to take over the Supreme Court. That is the only signal here; the rest is noise.

For the party that has been breaking checks-and-balances conventions of its own — the chairmanship of the legislation committee, for one — to cry foul at someone else’s breach is simply hypocritical. Especially when the Blue House reportedly pushed for a nominee with a conflict-of-interest problem. So are the Minjoo politicians who attacked a president’s attempt to influence Supreme Court appointments back when the president belonged to another party — and the progressive Hankyoreh, which has run contradictory editorials under President Yoon Suk-yeol and President Lee Jae-myung.

Don’t ask the wrong questions: was the Supreme Court right to break the convention, and can it keep its independence? No institution in Korea is truly independent of the president’s authority — as the euphemism “consultation” shows.

Here is the right question: why are the Lee administration and Minjoo so nervous?

Time is on their side. The Chief Justice retires next year, and the vacancy will go to whomever Mr Lee and Minjoo want. Minjoo’s February amendment to the Court Organization Act hands Mr Lee unprecedented influence over the Supreme Court: in the global tradition of court-packing, it expands the bench to 26 justices from 14. Mr Lee would appoint 22 of them in his term — including replacements for those reaching the retirement age.

Mr Lee and Minjoo are right to be nervous, because they have seen the damage a streak of independence in the judiciary can inflict on them.

The Chief Justice is living proof. Known as conservative-leaning but fair and modest, he was appointed to lead the Supreme Court with the blessing of almost every lawmaker, Minjoo’s included. What turned Minjoo against him was the court’s decision, weeks before the election, to overturn Mr Lee’s acquittal on election-law violations.

By bringing mob justice to the justices, Mr Lee and Minjoo are sending a message to whoever sits on the Supreme Court next.

Criminal Justice: The Privatization of Prosecution

Visitors to Korea remark often on its exceptional level of public safety. You can leave your wallet on a café table while you go to the restroom, and watch other people reserve their seats with their smartphones.

It wasn’t always like that. I remember, as a child, watching TV news reports on pickpockets working the streets in the 1990s. Korea’s low petty-crime rate traces largely to economic prosperity and, more importantly, to an efficient criminal justice system: a small country with a highly centralized police force, supervised by legal experts trained by the state — prosecutors. Not perfect, but good enough to impress foreigners.

Now all of that is in flux. The prosecution reform bill Mr Lee approved takes effect in October.

I won’t rehearse the details — I already did a deep dive — but the accountability vacuum it leaves in police supervision will haunt Minjoo for a long time.

Last week one such case began shaking public trust in the police. A Jeju woman’s family filed a missing-person report, and an officer improperly closed it in under three hours. The same officer, it turns out, had done the same to another report — and that missing person was found dead as soon as his family filed again, after learning of the woman’s case.

People are discovering how weak the oversight of police work actually is. The police-officer father of a rape-murderer was able to tamper with critical evidence. The Jeju officer removed missing-person reports from the police system singlehanded.

The overall effect of this unholy crusade since the Moon administration is already showing. The average period from police filing to final prosecutorial disposition more than doubled, to 313 days in 2024 from 142 in 2020.

What happens when people work out that punishment takes much longer to arrive, and that sometimes it never does?

In its trademark populist fashion, one Minjoo lawmaker put the reform in these words: “We will return the prosecution’s investigative powers — which have served as a shield for those in power — to the people.” Indeed. Ordinary people who fall victim to crime will now have to retain a lawyer to fill the void left by the prosecutor: the legal expert who acted on victims’ behalf, trained and paid by the state. Call it the privatization of prosecution.

Those in power, meanwhile, find it easier to avoid facing the music — provided you can afford a lawyer drawn from the police top brass, or belong to Minjoo. The police investigation into the numerous (and hardly obscure) suspicions surrounding one Minjoo heavyweight has been dragging on for about a year.

None of this will announce itself as a crisis. To paraphrase Eliot, this is the way the institutions end: not with a bang but a whimper — one closed file and one delayed disposition at a time. The bill arrives slowly — and Minjoo will still be in office to receive it.