Independent lawmaker Han Dong-hoon said Sunday that the ongoing debate over abolishing prosecutors' supplementary investigation rights is a peripheral issue, arguing that the judicial system has already been broken by prosecution reform and that the country must be restored through conservative rebuilding.
Han shared a post by Gyeonggi Province Governor Choo Mi-ae on prosecution reform on his Facebook page and said, "The judicial system has in fact already been destroyed by the abolition of the prosecution, and the hotly debated question of whether to abolish supplementary investigation rights is merely a peripheral issue that cannot revive a broken system."
He said the supplementary investigation rights issue is "simply a matter of whether to apply antiseptic ointment after stabbing someone and inflicting a fatal wound," adding, "It is clearly better than nothing, but it cannot save a system that has already been broken."
Han then said that under a Democratic Party government, crimes would be "buried and concealed one after another, as in the Jang Yun-gi case," warning that "ordinary people will be unable to recover money they are owed, and a world where money buys innocence will become the norm."
He called the situation the "Democratic Party government's responsibility" and stressed that conservatives must rebuild and "win a landslide victory in the 2028 general election to restore the country to normalcy."
Regarding the matter, Governor Choo said she was "sincerely sorry to democratic citizens for leaving without fully and irreversibly completing prosecution reform," adding, "We must not waver when we are on the final stretch of prosecution reform. Even if there is distrust and anxiety about handing investigations entirely to the police, that cannot be used as an excuse to delay reform of a prosecution that has usurped democratic constitutionalism."
On the Jang Yun-gi case, Choo drew a line, saying that while some argue prosecutors' supplementary investigation rights are essential because a senior police officer is suspected of destroying evidence in a murder case committed by his son, "prosecutors' supplementary investigations are direct investigations by prosecutors. A prosecutor's request for supplementary investigation is an indirect investigation conducted through the police. No matter how narrowly exceptions are defined, allowing prosecutors to conduct direct investigations is not a separation of investigation and indictment."
shindw@heraldcorp.com
