The South Korean parliament yesterday passed a sweeping legal reform bill that would strip prosecutors of investigative powers, a move that the government argues would curb the risk of political abuse of one of the nation’s most powerful state bodies.
The legislation would create a new agency that would exclusively handle indictments and prosecution and spin off the investigative function to a separate agency.
The landmark vote formalizes the separation of powers that South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and his liberal Democratic Party say is needed to prevent political abuse of unchecked prosecutorial power.
The push by liberals to break up the prosecution service gained momentum after former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol was accused by political rivals of using the institution to gain the presidency and persecute opponents.
The conservative Yoon’s short-lived martial law declaration in December 2024 became, for many reform advocates, the final argument for dismantling the institution that made him.
The bill’s passage caps a decades-long fight in South Korean politics to break up the prosecution service. Reform calls mounted as prosecutors were accused of targeting political enemies while protecting insiders, with liberals saying that such concentrated power invited abuse and weakened democratic accountability.
Park Eun-jung, a former prosecutor and lawmaker from the liberal Rebuilding Korea Party, said the point of the reform was to correct “a shameful history of prosecutors changing the standard of the law to suit their political advantage.”
However, critics, including the conservative opposition, who had sought to block the vote with a filibuster, say the overhaul risks weakening checks on investigators and turning reform into a tool of the incumbent government.
Korea University law professor Choi Jin-a said the bill would strip away the means to guarantee the prosecution service’s political neutrality and independence, “making prosecutors and police even more beholden to political power.”
Supporters say ending the prosecution’s monopoly is precisely the point.
“In democracy, no function is controlled by one group, and power works for the people through dispersion and checks,” former Democratic Party lawmaker Choe Kang-wook said.
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