hankyoreh

The presidential transition team says it wants to make the National Human Rights Commission an organization directly under the Office of the President. The dumbfounding idea ignores the very reason for the commission in the first place. The transition team also wants to create a new broadcasting and communications commission and have that also be directly under the president. It announced the larger direction of things, but when it comes to how it will put this new commission together, and how it will operate the two commissions, it has said nothing. We would hope that the idea did not originate from a desire to firm up government control of broadcasting.

“The National Human Rights Commission and the (existing) Broadcasting Commission do not exist anywhere within the legislative, judicial and executive branches,” the transition team said. “ This violates the constitutional principle of checks and balances.” It truly defies good sense to say something like that, especially about the Human Rights Commission. Is the transition team really ignorant of the fact that it is a body that exists to keep government authority in check? The need to have governmental human rights institutions be independent from other organs of the state in order to function properly was noted in the 1993 Principles relating to the Status of National Institutions for the promotion and protection of human rights, otherwise known as the Paris Principles, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

If the Human Rights Commission gets moved to the Office of the President, it will be the recipient of interference from the executive branch in terms of personnel, budget and even how it operates. It will obviously be subordinate to the executive branch, which it is supposed to watch and keep in check. Its ability to issue opinions or formal recommendations to the legislative and judicial branches and to the Constitutional Court will be hurt significantly. Any human rights commission that is forced to read the minds of those in power isn’t really a human rights commission. When the National Human Rights Commission Act was being put together in 2001, those in power wanted to have it be a regular government agency and were criticized for that idea. It was because of the earnest efforts of human rights groups that the commission was made an independent one like it was always supposed to be. The new administration’s attempt to reduce it to something that is a human rights institution only in appearance will further Korea’s reputation as a country way behind in human rights. The presidential transition team should withdraw its proposal to turn it into a presidential commission.

Creating a broadcasting and communications commission is something there was a lot of talk about during the administration of President Roh Moo-hyun, but the discussion was never brought to a conclusion. There should be no further delay in establishing a commission that promotes the development of related industries by making policy decision-making more effective. However, it must not be something that hurts the independence of broadcasting and other media. The big question is who is going to be appointing its members and how the body is going to make decisions. It is more than enough to make you wonder what the transition team’s motives are when it ignores things such as these and wants to amend the Government Organization Act to create a legal basis for having this broadcasting and communications commission be directly under the president. The National Assembly’s Special Committee on Broadcasting and Communications has talked about this kind of commission for some time. The right way to go about this would be for the National Assembly committee to explore the matter further and finalize the key details all at one time.


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