South Korea's rights watchdog is moving to put brakes on the prosecution and police investigators' longstanding practice of making indiscriminate searches and raids on email communications by ordinary citizens.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said Thursday that it has asked parliament to make guidelines and set a limit on searching and seizing criminal suspects' emails to minimize risk of privacy invasion from indiscriminate search practices.
The commission said it has submitted a written recommendation to the National Assembly speaker, urging enactment of legal grounds and guidelines on email searches saved in telecom service providers' servers and set a limit on the extent of email reading by outsiders.
The recommendation comes after the rights panel studied the revised bills on criminal law code on email search and restriction on electronic communications activities. The six related bills await parliamentary vote for passage.
The NHRC claimed the extent of email confiscation should be decided depending on charges, and police and prosecutors should avoid excessive data collecting unrelated to the crime.
It also called on investigators to notify the email users of the investigation procedure in advance. If those who have their emails searched are not given the right to demand the disposal of personal and irrelevant content, the raid could infringe upon people's basic rights, the commission said in the statement.