Acting heads of new prosecution bodies strike contrasting tones at launch ceremonies

The Serious Crime Investigation Agency and the Public Prosecution Service were officially launched Friday morning at separate inaugural ceremonies, both opening without permanent heads. The direction each organization intends to take was conveyed through remarks by their respective acting chiefs.

Jeon Jong-min, the SCIA's acting chief, said "restraint will be the foremost principle," while Lee Jeong-hyun, acting prosecutor general of the Public Prosecution Service, urged colleagues to "prove the agency's reason for existence and rebuild public trust."

Speaking at the inaugural ceremony at the agency's main office in Jung-gu, Seoul, Jeon said the country stood "at the center of the most sweeping transformation of the criminal justice system in 78 years." He said the road to Friday had been anything but smooth. "There were fierce debates and painful struggles at every step of establishing the roles and identity of the new agencies in the face of the era's demand for prosecutorial reform," he said.

Jeon said it was the public's will — a call to restore trust in criminal justice — that had made it possible to reach this point. "Because I understand the weight of that, I feel responsibility before joy today," he said.

He drew a parallel between the separation of state power into legislative, executive and judicial branches and the new division of investigation and indictment. "But dividing power alone is not enough," he said. "That division is only complete when each divided power exercises restraint upon itself."

Jeon said the SCIA would make restraint its foremost principle. "A search and seizure that fails to narrow the charges clears out an entire office. An investigation that fails to establish the facts consumes years of a person's life. The less certain investigators are, the more the investigation tends to spread," he said.

He added that restraint did not mean doing less investigating, but doing it more precisely. "Our effort to build investigative capacity is not to cut more, but to excise the root of the disease while cutting less. This is the principle of proportionality demanded by the Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the discipline the Serious Crime Investigation Agency imposes upon itself," he said.

Lee spoke at a closed inaugural ceremony Friday morning at the Public Prosecution Service's main building in Seocho-gu, Seoul. "Today we step onto a new starting line under the name Public Prosecution Service, leaving behind a name we have carried together for a long time," he said, according to the agency's spokesperson's office. He said he had expected to feel calm and composed, as on any other day, but found himself overwhelmed with emotion when he actually took the podium.

Lee said change is difficult for anyone. "All the more so because the change we face is not simply a renaming of an institution, but a profound shift in the operating principles of a long-established criminal justice system and in the way we work," he said.

He said he wanted to focus not on what would change, but on what must not. "The name of the institution, the departments we belong to, and the way we work may change — but our role as the nation's sole prosecutorial body and human rights protection agency, and our duty to protect the people, remain the same," he said.

Lee said that duty meant protecting crime victims and other vulnerable members of society, reaching fair conclusions based on facts and evidence, and safeguarding the fundamental rights and human rights of the people by upholding due process. "That is our reason for existence, and it is the essence of what we are — something that must not change even as the agency's name does," he said.

"From today, we must prove the Public Prosecution Service's reason for existence to the people once again and work to rebuild their trust," Lee said. "That trust will not be earned simply by hanging a new nameplate and launching the agency."

He said trust could only be built through the accumulation of days spent carefully reviewing every case, scrutinizing each page of the record and listening to the people involved. "The history of the new Public Prosecution Service must begin not with grand slogans, but with the attitude of sincerely engaging with each case before us and each individual citizen," he said.

Lee closed by expressing hope that the first step taken together would be remembered, when looking back on the agency's history, as the right first step toward earning the public's trust. "Even if dark clouds gather on the path ahead, I believe there is always a blue sky beyond them," he said.