Last year’s Sewol ferry disaster and a string of corruption scandals have bolstered public pressure on the National Assembly to pass bills aimed at curbing the rampant corruption in public service.
After a lot of foot-dragging, the parliament managed to pass one of the two key bills ― which is designed to restrict revolving-door employment ― late last year.
But the other bill ― to impose strict punishment on civil servants who take bribes ― did not make the list of about 150 bills passed by the parliament at the end of the year.
The so-called Kim Young-ran bill, named after the then head of the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission who proposed it more than 2 1/2 years ago, stipulates that civil servants who accept 1 million won or more in gifts will face criminal charges whether or not the money was related to their duties and favors were given in return.
This landmark bill ― whose full name is a bill for the “law to ban acts of illicit solicitation and prevention of conflicts of interest”―was stuck in parliament, however, even after the devastating ferry disaster that claimed more than 300 lives triggered public uproar over public servants’ corruption.
We already suspected that many lawmakers were lukewarm toward the bill partly because they too will be subject to the toughest-ever antigraft regulation. Yet, a survey conducted by a civic group for Assembly members leaves us speechless.
The Citizens Coalition for Social Justice said that it asked all of the 300 lawmakers about their positions on the bill. The outcome is unbelievable: only 41 of them expressed support for the bill, with one lawmaker saying no.
More lamentable is that, despite the CCSJ’s repeated requests for participation in the survey ― in fact, it even warned that lawmakers who did not respond to its questions would be regarded as indifferent to fighting corruption ― 46 said they could not provide answers for various reasons and that 212 lawmakers ignored the requests.
In other words, a total of 258 of our 300 lawmakers are opposed or indifferent to the bill. But few of them had raised opposition or mentioned its problems publicly, obviously because of the overwhelming public support for the bill. Our lawmakers not only lack the will to curb corruption. They are cowards as well.
Korea scored 55 out of a possible 100 in the Transparency International Corruption-Perceptions Index, which measures how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be. This put the country 43rd among 176 countries surveyed and 27th among the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
We wonder how our National Assembly would fare if Transparency International drew up a separate index for legislatures around the world.
