전관예우의 근절책

Abstract

The preferential treatment for retired public officers is rampant in doing businesses which are related to his or her former jobs, still in Korea. It is deep-rooted in Korean culture itself. Korea has had a unitary culture and simple race in cultural meaning, which has ordinarily the subculture of nepotism. In humankind history, there has been no such a nation as Korea whose racial and culture composition is so simple. So its tendency to nepotism is particular even compared to other tradition strong countries, for example Japan or European nations. And the preferential treatment has flourished even in judiciary system, whose essential part is fairness. Therefore it has benefited lawyers as retired judges and prosecutors, resulting in the corruption of courts and prosecutor’s offices. At the same time, brokers dealing with judicial matters, whom advanced nations’ people have never heard of, have continuously existed and exploited the preferential treatment for retired public officers. For so many years, Korean people have shouted out its evil effects, tried to eradicate it, but the efforts has almost failed in vain. This article’s main subject is to root it out successfully from Korean society. This article gets the start from saying that rooting out the preferential treatment for retired public officers is very difficult. Maybe the failure of previous efforts were caused from not recognizing the difficulty. That is, the efforts were focused on easy-going or superficial solutions. We have to be more serious and more patient to cope with it. I tried to seek out several ways to root out the treatment. I admit my proposals are not sufficient. I just wish them to be useful in discussing the matter and to be a start of sincere efforts to deal with it. I proposed, in advance, to write in the concept of judicial democratization that includes the openness of judicial process related to the eradication of nepotism or judicial neutrality into the Korean constitution. And it might be needed to declare abolition of statute of limitations of the crimes of public officers deliberately failing in dealing with judicially disputed matters or the suspending of it during his or her term of office. The special office for investigations against high ranking officials comprised of judges and prosecutors may have to be installed if we think of particular Korean circumstances in which predominant status of the officials, especially judges and prosecutors, is guaranteed. After them, I suggested the reinforcement of the disciplinary system of judges and prosecutors, which some people say has worked even to conceal the faults. And the heightening of authority of the commission of lawyers’ ethics, which is struggling with how to deal with faults of lawyers, may have some effect. If the time would come, when we don’t hear anything about the faulty treatment, Korean society already has entered in advanced society, which Koreans are yearning for after accomplishing economic miracles. And we could have a society of real rule of law in its true meaning.