The prosecutor's office has taken another big hit. Following a huge bribery scandal involving a deputy chief prosecutor and a sex scandal involving a junior prosecutor who graduated from law school, the head-on clash between the prosecutor general and the deputy chief prosecutor has been extinguished by the resignation of the chief prosecutor, but there is no telling when it will reignite. As a former prosecutor, I have been watching the events unfold, and my heart is filled with regret and sadness that the tower of the prosecutor general's tenure system has collapsed.

In Japan, when a judge had a sexual relationship with a female defendant around 1980, the Japanese public criticized the judge, not the court. In a way, the case of the deputy prosecutor and the law school graduate could be passed off as an individual problem, but the Korean public treats it as a problem of the entire prosecutor's office. The demand for prosecutorial reform is exploding right now, and the prosecutors are scrambling to come up with reforms in a hurry. This is evidence that the prosecutors are distrusted by the public.

The core of the distrust is that the appointment process of the Prosecutor General has distorted the intent of the tenure system, and in the same vein, the appointment of prosecutors has not been transparent. Deputy prosecutors with poor integrity continue to hold key positions, and law school graduates who were judged by their peers to have character flaws are appointed to prosecutor positions without any checks. The seriousness of the weaknesses in the HR system is that they are linked to the transparency of case handling. It is the accumulated grievances of the parties in numerous cases that have turned into a flashpoint for prosecutorial misconduct, which the prosecutor's office ignores.

The original intention of the tenure system was to ensure that the prosecutor general would not be subject to politics during his or her tenure, but would only fulfill his or her role in accordance with the will of the people. It was created by the people so that the government could not control the prosecutor's organization by changing the attorney general at will. However, in the early days, the prosecutor general was often replaced by the minister of justice immediately after taking office, making the tenure system irrelevant. A ministerial position with personnel power can be seductive enough. As long as the minister has a grudge, even a tenured attorney general will be beholden to the appointing authority. That's what the appointing authority wants. For this reason, there was once a provision in the Public Prosecutor's Office Act that restricted the prosecutor general from holding public office such as the attorney general for two years after the end of his term, but it was unfortunately abolished by the Constitutional Court. However, the spirit has survived, and the political establishment has come to recognize the problems of taking up public office immediately after the end of the prosecutor general's term, and the tradition has taken root that successive prosecutors general regard the position as their last public office. It is a tower built by the people.

But the current regime has removed the pillar of the prosecutor general's tenure. It set an unsavory precedent by reassigning a candidate for prosecutor general who was a high prosecutor to a lower ranking central prosecutor to put him to the test, and then immediately entrusted him with the prosecutor general's office. The central prosecutor's office is the center of major political and economic events in the country, so it is in the public eye to know who is in charge. Because of this, it is difficult for the central prosecutor to guarantee political neutrality in each case as he or she is competing for the position of prosecutor general. As long as the central prosecutor is on the list of candidates for the prosecutor general, the scales at the central prosecutor's office may tip in favor of those who have the power to appoint, and the public's trust in the prosecutor's neutrality will be eroded. The tenure system of the prosecutor general has been substantially undermined.

It is doubtful that even if the High Officials' Corruption Investigation Office is established and the Central Prosecutor's Office is abolished, much will be accomplished. The first step should be to exclude the central district prosecutors from the list of candidates for prosecutor general and to select a small number of people as candidates for prosecutor general in advance to be verified by the public for a period of time. Politicians and prosecutors alike should keep in mind that if they forget the basic spirit of the prosecutor general's tenure system, the consequences will surely boomerang back to them in the near future.