Judges retiring from public service -- like other civil servants -- are subject to restrictions when they seek reemployment in the private sector, including at law firms and commercial companies.
The regulation is necessary to prevent a revolving door between the court and private sector, which breeds corrupt ties between judges and their former colleagues.
Korea’s anti-revolving door rule under the Public Service Ethics Act stipulates that high-ranking public officials, including judges and prosecutors, cannot land a job for three years after retirement with private companies related to the business of the office for which they worked for five years prior to their retirement. Recent Supreme Court data has showed, however, this regulation to be useless.
It has been useless because there is a big loophole in the act: It allows each government agency’s ethics committee to give the go-ahead after reviewing cases of reemployment for retiring public officials.
The data showed that the Supreme Court’s ethics panel has given the go-ahead to 18 people -- 16 judges and two senior administrative staffers -- since 2012, permitting them to land jobs at law firms and companies like Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics.
In one case, the ethics committee allowed a former chief of the Daejeon High Court to get a job with a law firm shortly after his retirement. The panel insisted that as the chief of the local high court, the judge had performed only administrative duties for five years prior to his retirement and that he was not in a positon to exert influence on cases dealt with by the regional court.
This is too expedient a decision. You cannot rule out the possibility that clients or attorneys of the law firm that hired the former senior judge could get direct and indirect benefits from his connections to judges who had been under his direction. The same concerns should be raised over those who landed well-paid jobs at companies like Samsung and LG.
More eyebrow-raising is that in many cases, the court ethics panel’s review of the retired judges’ reemployment was not made in time. For instance, eight of the 18 cases dealt with by the panel conducted the review after the retired judges had begun work at their new jobs. It defies all logic that the reviews for four of the eight cases took place one year after retirement.
Recently, a former senior judge was indicted for taking 5 billion won ($4.56 million) from a cosmetics firm CEO charged with illegal gambling on a promise to get him lighter punishment on the strength of her personal ties to incumbent judges and prosecutors. There will soon be more such cases unless the loophole in the ethics act is closed.
