[Reporter’s Notebook]Prosecution’s Personnel Appointments Shaken by Undermined Principle of Merit-Based Rewards and Punishments

Personnel appointments are messages. In any organization, personnel changes convey the top leader's message to the members. Senior prosecutor appointments are a clear message from the Ministry of Justice and the prosecution leadership, based on investigation results and performance evaluations, about how they intend to lead the prosecution in the future. Prosecutors respond accordingly to this message; executives who submit their resignations after the announcement read it as a sign that there is no place for them within the organization.

However, the reaction among prosecution members to the promotion of the Suwon District Prosecutor to High Prosecutor on the 7th is unusual. Within the legal community, the prevailing view is that both investigations related to Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea, handled by the Suwon District Prosecutor's Office, have been stagnant. Nevertheless, the promotion of the chief investigator has sparked rumors.

While it is impossible to predict the final outcome, from the prosecution's perspective, which aims for swift, 'surgical' investigations that cut out only the affected parts, the current investigations cannot be considered successful. The allegation of Lee’s lawyer fee payments has yielded no significant results for over two years, and the related suspicion of Ssangbangwool’s illegal remittances to North Korea only began to be coordinated for Lee’s summons after former Gyeonggi Province Peace Deputy Governor Lee Hwa-young recently changed her testimony. Considering that the deputy chief prosecutor who led the investigation on the front lines was demoted in an unusual disciplinary action last September due to the investigation’s sluggish progress, the promotion of the district prosecutor, the top person responsible for this investigation, appears highly exceptional.

Senior prosecutor appointments are made by comprehensively evaluating investigation achievements, abilities, and members’ assessments. However, since the Suwon District Prosecutor’s Office is investigating Lee, a leading presidential candidate, as a suspect, investigation results were the top priority in evaluating this appointment over other factors.

Because of this, there are even voices within the prosecution saying that the principle of rewarding and punishing based on merit and the current administration’s personnel policy of ‘fairness and common sense’ have collapsed, and regardless of how the appointment decision was made, this personnel change has instilled the perception among prosecution members that work performance and personnel outcomes can differ.

The prosecution experienced a breakdown in its operational system during the previous administration, when some underqualified prosecutors advanced politically while highly capable individuals left the prosecution. Not every investigation yields the initially expected results. However, the prosecution’s discipline must be maintained through personnel decisions that correspond to those results. To normalize the previously broken prosecution organization, personnel principles based on fairness, common sense, and clear merit-based rewards and punishments must be reaffirmed.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.