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Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl outside the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office in Seoul on Dec. 8. (Yonhap News)

The meeting of the disciplinary board that will review charges against South Korean Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl is just one day away. During the raucous brawl over procedural issues, the social debate about the actual charges behind the disciplinary proceedings has been largely muted. Some have even been asking how the disciplinary proceedings against Yoon are connected with prosecutorial reform. Let’s examine these questions together in this column.

The prosecutorial code of ethics states that a prosecutor should not make private contact, without a legitimate reason, with someone connected to a case or other aspect of their work. If Yoon met for drinks with the media company owner, who was connected to a case, that would obviously be a violation of the code of ethics. (Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae needs to state explicitly the case connected to the media company owner.) If the code of ethics, which guarantees the fairness of the prosecution service, does not strictly apply to the leaders of that service, what signal would that send about the organization as a whole?

After it was confirmed that prosecutors on the job were treated to millions of won worth of entertainment at a hostess bar, one of the prosecutors was indicted on Dec. 8. Scandals about prosecutors receiving lavish entertainment and sponsorship have appeared with nauseating frequency. If the code of conduct is just a scrap of paper with fine-sounding language, this kind of thing will keep happening indefinitely. Prosecutorial reform begins at the basic level of establishing rules to govern prosecutors’ behavior.

While a conference of South Korean judges didn’t issue a statement about this issue on Dec. 7, they were attempting to fulfill their duty to political neutrality rather than acknowledging the legitimacy of the document itself. Yoon’s attorneys have argued that the document isn’t problematic, citing American and Japanese pamphlets containing information about judges, but those pamphlets were made by private companies, not by the prosecutors themselves. The surveillance here is a problem because information is being collected by government agencies, rather than the private sector.

The document also reveals the prosecutors’ attitude toward specific cases. “They appear to be trying to secure a guilty verdict through any means necessary, even if that means exploiting the judge’s ideological orientation, to prevent the acquittal of defendants that they’ve personally investigated. That’s not the attitude of an impartial prosecutor,” said Jang Chang-guk, a senior judge in the Jeju District Court.

As representatives of the public interest, prosecutors have a duty of objectivity, which means they’re also supposed to consider the interests of the defendant. Such a principle can’t survive when investigators are pulling out all the stops to achieve their objectives.

A few days ago, a close aide of Democratic Party leader Lee Nak-yon took his own life while being investigated by the prosecutors. It was the fourth suicide among investigation suspects over the past year. If the prosecutors, instead of being directly in charge of investigations, were responsible for keeping tabs on human rights abuses and filing charges and prosecuting cases from an objective perspective, wouldn’t it be possible to prevent some of these tragedies? This brings to mind the major objective of prosecutorial reform: namely, separating the powers of investigation and indictment.

While it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, this is another charge raised in the disciplinary proceedings. When charges were raised about coercion and doctored evidence in an investigation into former Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook in May, the inspection department at the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office (SPO) attempted to launch an inspection into this matter.

But then Yoon apparently ordered that the matter be handed over to the office of the human rights supervisor at the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office. When the head of the inspection department objected, a senior manager at the SPO asked for a copy of the department’s petition — purely for reference purposes, it claimed — and then promptly had that sent to the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, labeled as “transfer of an SPO petition.”

A few days ago, two officials employed at the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy were put in detention on charges of deleting documents related to the early closure of the Wolsong-1 nuclear reactor shortly before the Board of Audit and Inspection was set to look into the matter.

The two incidents are similar in that, in both cases, government officials mishandled official documents in order to obstruct an audit or inspection. Does it make sense to detain the officials in one incident and to not even discipline the officials in the other? One of the long-standing principles behind prosecutorial reform is that people inside the prosecution service should be held to the same standards as those outside of it.

Yoon has committed the fatal mistake of letting the prosecution service be politically tainted. By making remarks leaving open the possibility of a political career, he has fostered suspicions that his position as prosecutor general could be abused for his own political objectives.

While the judicial conference might look timid in its decision not to call out alleged surveillance against judges, from another point of view, it may also indicate the judiciary’s commitment to the rule of law and the imperative to maintain political neutrality.

That stands in contrast with the prosecutors, which have created a situation in which they’re openly being called the “prosecutorial party” despite being nominally a quasi-judicial agency whose status is second only to the courts. Yoon bears a heavy responsibility for that.

The allegations raised in Yoon’s disciplinary proceedings are connected with aspects of the prosecution service that require reform, including its exercise of absolute authority, the absence of checks and balances, and its political bias. If the allegations are true, we cannot allow such behavior to be repeated.

Regardless of what disciplinary action Yoon may ultimately face, those are issues that need to be thoroughly assessed, both legally and socially.

By Park Yong-hyoun, editorial writer

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]