Korea abolishes Prosecutors' Office after 78 years, putting new criminal justice system to test

Korea on Friday abolished the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office after 78 years and launched two new state agencies dividing its investigative and prosecutorial powers, ushering in one of the most sweeping changes to the country’s criminal justice system in decades.

Under the new framework taking effect Friday, investigations will be divided among the newly established Serious Crimes Investigation Agency (SCIA), the police and the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO). The new Prosecution Service will review cases, decide whether to indict suspects, request warrants from courts based on applications from investigative agencies and conduct prosecutions in court.

But the launch of the new system leaves several unanswered questions: How agencies will handle cases when their jurisdictions overlap, whether prosecutors can exercise sufficient oversight without investigative authority of their own and whether the new agencies are adequately staffed and equipped to take over complex major-crime investigations.

In the days leading up to the overhaul, prosecutor’s offices nationwide had been removing visible traces of the old institution. At the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office in Seoul, workers ground off the word “prosecution” engraved on manhole covers, while signs bearing the prosecution’s bamboo emblem and the Prosecutors’ History Museum were taken down.

The overhaul formally decouples investigations from prosecutions. It dismantles a system in which prosecutors possessed sweeping authority to directly probe major cases, conduct supplementary investigations and ultimately decide whether to indict suspects.

Prosecutors may still request that investigative agencies conduct additional work when they find gaps in a case file. However, they are no longer allowed to force the police or the SCIA to follow their requests, or directly conduct supplementary investigations.

Under the new framework, the SCIA will hold investigative authority over six serious crime categories — corruption, major economic crimes, defense industry offenses, organized drug trafficking, national security violations and cybercrime — in addition to the newly-established crime of law distortion.

CIO officials will continue to investigate designated offenses involving senior public officials. Police will generally investigate ordinary offenses. In some cases, however, the jurisdictions of the police, the SCIA and the CIO could overlap — particularly in corruption and abuse-of-power allegations involving high-ranking officials.

That overlap has become one of the biggest concerns surrounding the reform, as the formal consultative committee that would handle disputes over jurisdictions will not be established until Feb. 5 next year.

That means the police, the SCIA and the CIO will have to rely on informal consultations and working-level arrangements during the transition period. Critics warn that this could lead to duplicated investigations, delayed case transfers or “ping-pong” disputes between agencies over responsibility for politically sensitive or complex cases.

Such worries have recently been fueled by the case involving Jang Yoon-gi, who was convicted of murdering a high school student in Gwangju. His police officer father helped conceal evidence in an apparent effort to prevent the case from being treated as murder-rape — an offense subject to a significantly heavier punishment.

Similar concerns have been raised by a recent missing person case in Jeju, where a police officer was accused of closing the investigation into the whereabouts of a woman in her 30s without confirming that she was safe. Her body was later found, prompting scrutiny of the police’s internal oversight system and its ability to police itself.

Another immediate challenge is the SCIA’s ability to absorb the former prosecution’s role in major-crime investigations, which require specialized expertise in areas such as cybercrime and complex financial crimes.

The SCIA’s launch-preparation team received a combined 1,962 applications through two rounds of special recruitment for investigators. Even if all applicants are hired, the agency would fill only 68.3 percent of its authorized workforce of 2,874, leaving it short of about 900 personnel and requiring further recruitment through additional hiring after its launch.

The SCIA will also begin operations without its inaugural chief in place. Kim Ji-yong, President Lee Jae Myung’s nominee to lead the agency, has yet to undergo a parliamentary confirmation hearing, meaning he will not be able to take office when the new institution launches Friday.

His nomination has drawn pushback from hard-liners within the ruling camp over his career as a prosecutor. Some critics have warned that putting a former prosecutor in charge could turn the SCIA into a “second Prosecutors’ Office” under a different name, while others have accused Kim of being aligned with impeached former President Yoon Suk Yeol, himself a former prosecutor.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Seong Ghi-hong, senior presidential secretary for public affairs, said the presidential office plans to submit the nominee’s confirmation-hearing request to the National Assembly within the next few days.

"Some of the allegations raised by critics were either factually inaccurate or based on vague speculation, and we determined that they did not warrant denying the nominee an opportunity at this stage to explain himself before the National Assembly’s confirmation hearing," he said.

Earlier, Lee said on social media that an independent recommendation committee, following public nominations, narrowed the list to four candidates, from which the interior minister selected Kim as the final nominee after consultations and recommended him to the president.

Experts say the system reform’s ultimate test will be whether it improves the public’s sense of safety. The transition may be most vulnerable in investigations into violent crime, sexual offenses and other cases that directly affect daily life, one professor said, warning that poor coordination between police and prosecutors could undermine public confidence.

“The government and the ruling bloc will have to prove through results that the new system is better than the old one,” Cho Jin-man, professor at Duksung Women’s University, told The Korea Times. “If ordinary people come to feel that serious crimes are not being properly investigated or that public safety has weakened, criticism of the prosecution reform could grow very quickly.”