By Lee Hyo-sik
A senior police officer dispatched to the state human rights agency was found to have stolen an internal document concerning the torture of suspects by detectives at a Seoul police station last year.
The officer then passed the paper to police headquarters which later pressured the rights agency to tone down its assessment of the torture cases.
In response, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) did not lodge a criminal charge against the officer, but instead asked the police to reprimand him. He returned to the force without facing any disciplinary action.
According to the NHRC Sunday, the police inspector stole an investigation report on a series of complaints filed against Yangcheon Police Station in southwest Seoul in September last year. At the time, the rights panel was looking into possible police brutality against dozens of suspects after a 45-year-old man who was arrested on theft charges filed a petition against the police station. He insisted that he was tortured into confessing his crime.
The inspector delivered the NHRC report to the National Police Agency (NPA). The agency then demanded the commission reconsider its views in the assessment report and pressured it not to include anything critical of the involved police officers in the report.
The NHRC later launched an internal probe and found that the police inspector hacked into its intranet system and stole the document. The commission then informed the NPA of its findings and asked it to punish the officer accordingly.
But he returned to the police station where he had been working before being dispatched to the rights agency and did not face any disciplinary action.
“The inspector clearly broke the National Human Rights Law by leaking internal documents. It did not make any sense that the police to do nothing about it,” an NHRC official said.
Under the law, NHRC employees are banned from leaking work-related information. Those who break such rules face a jail sentence of up to two years and a five-year suspension from duties.
The commission could have filed a formal criminal charge with the prosecution against the inspector, but did not.
“We decided not to formally charge him because if we did, we might have to hand over other internal documents related to the case to the prosecution. We did not want that to happen,” the NHRC official said.
Despite strong protests from the police, the commission referred five policemen working at the Yangcheon Police Station to the prosecution, accusing them of having illegally tortured suspects by employing inhumane methods to coerce confessions from them.
The police station flatly rejected the commission’s claims, saying none of its officers engaged in such illegal activities.
Following the NHRC’s actions, the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office launched an investigation and decided to charge five. Prosecutors asked the court in December 2010 to put a 40-year-old lieutenant surnamed Sung and four other officers behind bars for up to 10 years.
Sung was sentenced to three years in prison, while the four others received either prison terms of less than one year or suspended sentences.