The Marmot’s Hole

Sperwer

Cathartidae is right; nothing new here - except perhaps Weisbart’s credulity about the retrurn of the recalcitrant three to Hong Kong. Anyone want to make book on the chances of Seoul’s complying in a forthright and expeditious manner when they don’t return on their own and HK seeks extradition?

oranckay

Well said, Cathartidae. I see more venting than insight in that piece.

Can you imagine the uproar if some foreigners came here and protested violently, disrupting lives and businesses, injuring hard working, everyday Korean policemen, only to be given a get-out-of-jail-free card just because their home government begged? If the shoe was on the other foot, Koreans would be screaming bloody murder.

He’s talking about North Korea, perhaps?

I mean really, what is the evidence for this claim? Other than when the offending nationality is one that a lot of Koreans are looking to teach a lesson to (like the U.S., Japan), when is that really the case?

To Hong Kong, Korea is just another country. Similarly, if people from a nation Koreans consider just another country came and misbehaved and then went just as overboard begging for leniency, I think much of the Korean public would suprisingly sympathetic, whatever the legal outcome.

Way back when two Pakistanis were accused of murder - the first for non-USFK foreigners - there were actually open calls for the Korean justice system to take their culture into consideration. Apparently the feud had begun way back in Pakistan and there were some feudal/tribal justifications for their actions. They were given heavy sentences and the judgment actually said that the country needs to be firm on crime by foreigners in this age of internationalization, but there were Koreans who questioned that, given their “culture.”

The hypocrisy I see here is double standard regarding relations with different countries. I simply cannot see Koreans working as hard to get those guys released and expecting such results if they had been arrested for the same behavior in the U.S. and most European countries. Hong Kong though… that former British military/opium trading base that has forever lost its former glory…. Korea exerted its influence and won, so was right all along to arrogantly assume that Hong Kong would remember which of the two is the bigger boys on the playground and who needs who the most.

Sperwer

Mr. Weisbart:

I don’t agree that the “justice system … is the last bastion of dictatorship here on the peninsula.” The problem is deeper and worse. The Korean legal system is a complex of institutions that taken as a whole is wholly deficient for a genuinely democratic society and, while some of its most mis-shapen limbs were made that way by the dictators, the fundamental character of Korean legal institutions was formed by previous centuries of authoritarianism that reified a theory of law and the status of those who practice and enforce it (at the prosecutorial level) that is profoundly anti-democratic. Having more than a passing interest in these matters, I have read the previous articles of yours to which you refer with interest and applaud your interest in promoting change. Success, though, will require a sharper scalpel and a better hand to wield it than that of the Great Pretender and his Roh-Nothings. Their purpose seems only to get the hands on the legal levers to work their own oppressive ends.

Michael

Didn’t bother to read the column (sorry Mike), it’s another in the endless harping that the KT and to a lesser extent the Herald do about how Koreans should behave, and it’s very clear to all but the editorial writers that these critiques have about zero impact on Korean society, even if “most of KT’s readers are Koreans,” which is unproven–when’s the last time the newspaper’s circulation has been measured by an outside auditor, Mike?

Anyway, Koreans protest exactly the way Kimbob described, and it’s not going to end anytime soon unless the gov’t imposes the rule of law in Korea in an open and consistent manner, e.g. punishing protestors for attacking police just as police are punished for alleged abuse of protestors. There’s little hope of that occuring while Roh is in office; hopefully the next president will be less shortsighted.

Sperwer

Kushibo:

Re the latter of your questions, a creditable start has been made with the efforts to introduce a jury system and to create some institutional checks and balances within the the justice system by bifurcating the investigative and prosecutorial functions and assigning the former to the police - a cause in favor of which Weisbart has written. (On the other hand, the other current intitiative to put citizens on judicial panels is a really bad idea.) Much more needs to be done along these lines, but the technical details are way beyond the remit of this forum.

Re the former, let me start by noting how loaded your question is; you imply that the defects of the Korean legal system are attributable to the Japanese occupation. The Japanese colonial legacy is in this, like most things, mixed. It was unquestionably authoritarian, but at the same time it served to introduce modern (and Western) legal (and political) concepts to Korea in a systematic way. The Meiji constitution and legal system generally were modeled on the late 19th century German version of the European civil code system. The fact that it was subverted and used by the militarists for their own purposes - both in Korea and Japan itself - is mostly besides the point, except as an illustration of the futility or at least frequently counterproductive effect in the short run of attempts to impose rather abstract ideologies in a top-down fashion - particularly in cultures such as Japan’s and to an even greater extent Korea’s where the structure of the traditional society was strikingly and oppressdively authoritarian and more or less without intermediate autonomous loci of political legitimacy, authority and power. In other words, Korean authoritarianism long-predated the Japanese colonial period, and arguably was more pervasive than the contemporary Japanese version because of the relatively greater lack of sources of intermediate political power. The one great thing they had in common was a broadly “legalist” conception of the function of law and legal institutions as instruments by which the state (and those who controlled it) enforced its and their will on the populace more or less without regard to the consent of the governed. Albeit generally somewhat attentuated, and with some genuine exceptions and a lot of phoniness among many exceptions manque on the Korean left) that I submit is still the prevailing ethos of the law and the legal profession in Korea.

kushibo

Re the former, let me start by noting how loaded your question is; you imply that the defects of the Korean legal system are attributable to the Japanese occupation.

My question wasn’t loaded: you claimed to be knowledgeable about this and I was asking your opinion out of genuine curiosity. No agenda whatsoever.

I asked about “pre-colonial carry-overs” because the colonial period could logically be seen as an end of the “previous centuries of authoritarianism” that you cited. Again, no agenda in mind whatsoever (in fact, if I were in proper academic mode, I could probably make a case that the vestiges of colonial-era judicial administration were kept around because they were either an improvement over the past or they were seen as an improvement).

So now… ah, fuck it. I appreciate that you took the time to write a lengthy couple of responses to my question, and I will read them later. But I pretty much stopped at the end of your sentence above because I’m too busy and too stressed out over a computer problem right now to have to sift through the baggage of another high-tension thread which I fear your statement above indicates.

So for now I’ll just say that I resent your assumption that me just mentioning the word “colonial” makes what I write “loaded” with anti-Japanese implications. With all due respect, maybe it’s you who needs to be more cautious about what it is you infer, at least in this case.