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 arguing 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”.
But 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.
Choi Jin-a, a law professor at Korea University, 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,” said former Democratic Party lawmaker Choe Kang-wook.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/south-korea-parliament-bill-stripping-prosecutor-investigative-powers-6006501
