An unlikely victim of the delay in the opening of the National Assembly is the Supreme Court, with four justice nominees waiting for their confirmation hearings. The court’s operations will be hindered when the four justice posts are not filled upon being vacated. But a political standoff is holding the court hostage and, by doing so, hindering the right to a prompt trial.
The court is composed of the chief justice and 13 justices. Petty benches, each with four justices, deal most of the cases appealed to the court. But the court will find that it is stretched too thinly when it makes a full-bench ruling on crucial cases. It takes the chief justice and eight or more justices to form a full bench, with the justice for judicial administration not participating in any ruling.
It will be technically impossible for new justices to start work on July 11, the day when they are set to fill the vacancies, if the National Assembly fails to open its first session and elect its speaker on Tuesday. Confirmation committees cannot be formed in the absence of the speaker, who has the power to select committee members.
But negotiations between the ruling and main opposition parties show few signs of a breakthrough in their standoff over when to start operations in the new National Assembly. The rival parties, which previously wangled over how to divvy up the 18 posts of standing committee chairmen, are now locking horns with each other over a seemingly irrelevant issue ― the opposition Democratic United Party’s demands for a hearing on strikes being held at the MBC TV and radio network.
It is not unusual for the opening of a new National Assembly to be delayed for more than a month. A party, when defeated in parliamentary elections, resorts to delaying tactics to get the most out of its negotiations with the new majority or plurality party. It took 36 days past the scheduled opening to normalize operations at the National Assembly when the ruling Saenuri Party’s predecessor was in opposition in 2004.
Of course, this is not to say that such tactics can be condoned. On the contrary, they deserve public denunciation, and all the more so if it is detrimental to the right to a speedy trial. The parties are called on to start the confirmation process immediately.
