A Study on the Procedural Control of Police
Authors:   The Korean Association of Criminal Procedure Law, Jeong Oung-Seok 
Published: February 2023

With the inauguration of the Yoon Seok-ryul government, discussions on police reform are hot. The core of this can be seen as the establishment of a so-called “police station” within the Ministry of Public Administration and Security, and the reason why the establishment of a police station became a key task in the Yoon Seok-ryul government is that control of the police has been raised as police investigation rights have expanded. Accordingly, Minister of Public Administration and Security Lee Sang-min launched the Police System Improvement Advisory Committee (hereinafter abbreviated as the Advisory Committee), established a police station in the Ministry of Public Administration and Security according to the advisory committee’s recommendation, and the police station was launched on August 2, 2022. Regarding the launch of the police station, there is constant controversy over whether “security” is the secretary of the Ministry of Public Administration and Security, and Article 34 (5) of the Government Organization Act stipulates security affairs as the National Police Agency, but it is not separately stipulated in the duties of the Minister of Public Administration and Security.
However, through the revision of the Criminal Procedure Act and the Prosecutor’s Office Act in 2020, the prosecution’s command of investigation was abolished, and the scope of direct investigation was limited to six crimes, and reduced to two crimes (0.4%) through the revision in 2022. According to this, the judicial police have the right to initiate and proceed with the investigation of 99.6% cases and terminate the investigation, so a new interpretation of the police’s investigation work is needed. As a result, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Public Administration and Security were forced to review the final attribution of the police investigation, and eventually appeared as a consultative office for the enactment of the Presidential Decree, which stipulates the investigation rules under Article 196 (2) of the Criminal Procedure Act. This is because Article 66 (Presidential Status/Responsibility) (4) stipulates that “administrative power belongs to the government” and Article 88 (Power/Composition of the State Council) (1) stipulates that “the State Council deliberates on important policies under the authority of the government”.
However, no matter what judicial system is followed, the criminal justice system is directly related to the rights and interests of the people in the process of realizing the national criminal right, and it is difficult to correct it if it is incompletely designed due to the nature of the system. The problem is that although the Criminal Procedure Act was revised in the name of judicial reform, much of the case was granted to judicial police officers, ignoring the reality of Korea being investigated by judicial police officers, which is a modified structure different from the continental and Anglo-American judicial systems.
In the end, it is necessary to revise the Criminal Procedure Act with the police and the prosecutor’s system, and if necessary, reform should be carried out in a way that restores the prosecution’s (quasi) judicial character through the separation of the prosecutor’s (direct) investigation and the prosecution’s an investigative command.