By Michael Breen

President Lee Myung-bak has just conducted a traditional mass pardon of criminals to mark Liberation Day Saturday in a gesture to win popular support.

Those who were pardoned include 1,505,376 minor traffic offenders, 9,467 business criminals and 8,764 fishermen whose licenses were suspended or canceled for minor offenses. The pardon means that the original crime will be forgiven and stricken from the individual's record. There will also be clemency ― lessening the penalty without forgiving the crime ― for 1,633 convicts, including those over 70, in bad health, and who have behaved well in jail.

Tomorrow's will be the third such wave of the presidential wand in 18 months. The first, in June 2008, marked Lee's 100 days as president and cleared 2.8 million people, mostly traffic offenders. It was followed last August with a special pardon covering 328,335 bureaucrats, 1,902 Election Law breakers, 74 leading businessman and some more traffic offenders.

That one was billed as an effort to encourage the business community to redouble its efforts to revive the economy, but was criticized for favoring the wrong people. This year, Lee is being more careful.

``Unlike previous pardons, we gave no favors to any convicted public figures, including politicians and businessmen," said Han Sang-dae, a senior justice ministry official. ``We adopted the same standard in selecting beneficiaries regardless of their previous social status."

Presidential pardons, as this explanation suggests, are a populist gesture. In undertaking them, though, presidents, in their yearning to be loved by the masses, fail to see why they don't work.

There are two obvious reasons. The first is that such sweeping pardons represent a form of power abuse. Surely something is wrong with the system if, every few months, the president himself has to peer down from the top and let a million people off? Yes, we know that the historic experience of Koreans with law is that it was a club wielded by the powerful to abuse, cheat and control the people. But why perpetuate such attitudes by blatantly ignoring the legal process that has netted all those traffic violators and other offenders?

Surely the president should be endorsing the system and only issuing pardons where there has been a clear miscarriage of justice. For example, how about pardoning Cho Bong-am, the politician who proposed talks with North Korea and was executed for it on bogus spying charges in 1959? How about pardoning soldiers shot for cowardice during the war? There are procedures for such pardons, and, as frustrating as it may be for victims and families, it is lengthy and cumbersome, precisely to avoid the pardon itself being arbitrary.

The second and related reason is that the mass presidential pardons send a very strong message that punishment does not fit crime. In other words, either the law, or the people enforcing it, is whimsical, vicious, unfair, irrational or somehow so inhumane that the benevolent father-president just has to step in every so often and protect us from it or them.

Even lawyers don't seem to get this very clearly. Lee Hun, the head of a progressive lawyers' association, was quoted in this paper saying, ``We believe it will help relieve financial difficulties many minor offenders have faced." He did add though that granting amnesty too often was not a good idea.

Civic groups, however, just appear to be happy because the latest pardons exclude public figures. ``We welcome the decision," said Jeon Hee-kyung of Citizens United for a Better Society. ``This showed that the government is trying to play by the rules."

Whatever rules they may be, they are not the law.

Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants and exclusive partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.