공직자비리수사처설치법률안에 대한 비판적 고찰

Abstract

Recently the task-related corruption scandals of former and current prosecutors have been highly criticized. Thus, the public demanded that there should be a special investigation team solely focusing on prosecution, judiciary and high-ranked officials. Following public opinion, the government proposed a new bill called “the Independent Investigation Office against the High-ranking Officials’ Crimes”. However, this bill is merely dividing the prosecution into two instead of preventing corruption within the organization. It can also be problematic to the currently discussed reform of trial-oriented criminal judicature and to the reform of investigation structure for the separation of investigation and indictment as it was declared by the time criminal procedure law was enacted. Therefore, without discussing the separation between the right to investigate and the right to indict, which has been the main cause of the overpowered prosecution in Korea, this bill, which purpose is to prevent the power monopoly of the prosecution, is likely not to be accepted by the public in long term. Needed is the subtraction of direct investigation duty of the Special Prosecutors and giving them only the role of controlling the investigation so they can act from an observing point of view. One of such investigation structure is the “Warrant-specialized Prosecutor System”. A Warrant-specialized Prosecutor does not interact with the investigation directly, but can efficiently act as a regulator from a third person perspective. Following this system, the dossiers of suspect interrogation the investigator in charge writes loses its acceptability as evidence in court as it was not written by the prosecutor. This makes it necessary to make court testimonies of the investigators mandatory, which can lead to the possibility of finally leaving the so-called 'Dossiers Trials’ behind. Furthermore, such reform in both structure and role of Special Prosecutor and Special Investigator will build a three-way anti-corruption system-Investigation, Control and Indictment-and will become an important step to resolve animosity between police and prosecution and bring them closer together.