[Editorial] Biased compromise

Since June, the Prime Minister’s Office has sought to mediate a conflict between the prosecution and the police over criminal investigation rights. But the office could not come up with a compromise that was satisfactory to both sides. To resolve the long drawn-out dispute once and for all, it had to invoke its authority to force a compromise on them.

On Wednesday, the PMO announced its final answer to the knotty problem in the form of a draft to revise the relevant presidential ordinance. The draft, however, infuriated the police as it largely accommodated the positions of public prosecutors. Cho Hyun-oh, commissioner general of the National Police Agency, declared that he could not accept the PMO’s compromise because it was biased against the police.

The draft wounded the pride of the police by proposing to restrict their long-held investigative powers. Currently, police officers normally question witnesses, trace bank accounts, and conduct searches and seizures without prosecutors’ supervision. They view these acts as constituting the initial inquiry phase of a pre-trial criminal investigation.

The PMO’s compromise seeks to curb these powers by making it mandatory for police officers to provide inquiry files and evidence to prosecutors for cases where they questioned a suspect and drew up a report, arrested a suspect without a warrant, applied for an arrest warrant for a suspect, or conducted a search and seizure at a suspect’s residence.

Currently, police stations do not report to prosecutors about the cases they investigated but closed for lack of evidence. The draft attempts to mend this practice, reflecting prosecutors’ justified concern about police officers abusing their powers and breaching suspects’ rights.

Yet any attempt to curb the police’s investigatory powers goes against the spirit of the agreement reached between the two sides in July for the revision of the Criminal Procedure Act. The agreement, mediated by Cheong Wa Dae, not only recognized police officers’ independence in the inquiry phase but acknowledged their right to launch a post-inquiry criminal investigation without prosecutor approval.

It is in this context that the National Assembly’s Public Administration and Security Committee said the PMO’s draft was not in compliance with the intent of the amended law and asked the office to put on hold the process to revise the ordinance until the two sides could reach a consensus.

The draft seeks to strike a balance in the relationship between prosecutors and police investigators by proposing to give the latter the right to advise prosecutors to reconsider their instructions when they are deemed problematic. If prosecutors do not take necessary steps, police investigators can deliver their views to the heads of the relevant prosecution offices.

This right would constrain prosecutors’ authority to supervise police investigators. But to the police, it is a small gain compared with the proposed control by prosecutors of their investigative powers.

The two sides need to resolve the dispute from the perspective of minimizing the room for possible power abuse and human rights violations of suspects by police investigators as well as prosecutors. In addition, prosecutors should respect the police’s independence and treat police investigators as partners. For their part, police officers need to make conscious efforts to win prosecutors’ trust.