Criminal Justice in South Korea Criminal Justice in South Korea This paper will

South Korea has a tradition of criminal law, based upon Chinese legal codes and Confucian philosophy, going back to the 7th Century A.D. Under this tradition, the central government was the source of all power and the norms followed by all citizens. The criminal codes were very detailed, defining all offenses possible and providing additional laws which incorporated exceptional cases. Features of the criminal law included differentiation between intentional and accidental acts, consideration of the accused's mental capacity, and punishments which took into account the defendant's social class and political status.

This system began changing in the 1890s as the country underwent westernization and modernization. From 1910 to 1945, the Japanese imposed their own legal system, based upon the German codes enacted after 1871, as part of the occupation. In 1948, with the founding of the Republic of Korea, the Judiciary and the courts were established as a separate and independent branch of the government, patterned after the provisions in the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, a modern criminal code and code of criminal procedure was enacted in the early 1950s.

In spite of a nominally democratic constitution and form of government set up in 1945, modern South Korea rarely

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successor to the Constitution Committee, which operated before the 1987 Constitution. The new provisions which govern the duties of the Court reflect the criticism that the Committee had been beholden to the President (all of the Committee members were appointed by the President). One of the primary goals of the provisions establishing the Court is to establish an independent judiciary committed to democracy and justice under the law. A human rights report, submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Committee by the South Korean government in the summer of 1991, stated that the Court had been effective in checking the abusive acts of the government, securing the independence of the judiciary, and protecting fundamental human rights. The report noted that the Court had decided more than 50 challenges to legislation since 1987 and that it had declared laws unconstitutional in 20 cases. On the other hand, a 1992 human rights report by the U.S. State Department noted that while the significance of all courts grew in 1991, the judiciary still remains subject to executive influence in political cases and that the number of political prisoners and detainees remains in the hundreds. For instance, although acknowledging that it is anac
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Approximate Word count = 2133
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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