The Seoul Central District Prosecution Office said it will strengthen its review of cases that police decide not to refer to prosecutors, aiming to close gaps in relief for victims of poorly conducted investigations. The office is assigning experienced prosecutors to dedicated divisions and will push to remove from duty and seek disciplinary action against officers who fail to carry out reinvestigation requests without justification.
The office said on the 15th that it has created the First and Second Non-Referral Review Divisions under an organizational overhaul and staffed them with nine experienced prosecutors. The group consists of three deputy division chiefs and six prosecutors with more than 10 years of experience, drawn from backgrounds including anti-corruption, tax crime, cybercrime and information technology crime investigations.
The new divisions will take exclusive charge of non-referral and suspended-investigation cases that had been divided between the existing criminal divisions and the Major Economic Crime Investigation Unit. They will also handle all objections filed by victims and other parties contesting police decisions not to refer cases. Prosecutors plan to review entire investigative records sent by police to the same standard applied to referred cases, and to hear directly from those involved in order to check whether investigations were lawful and appropriate.
Cases in which the investigation was inadequate or in which evidence was misjudged or the law misapplied will be sent back for reinvestigation, with no limit on the number of requests. When an adequate reinvestigation cannot be expected from the original investigating body, the office plans to request that a higher-level police agency or a different investigative body take over.
Prosecutorial oversight of police investigations will also be tightened. If an officer fails to carry out a reinvestigation request without justification, the office will seek the officer's removal from duty and disciplinary action under consistent standards and procedures. It also plans to act aggressively against officers suspected of neglecting their duties or of illegal conduct or collusion.
From September last year through August this year, the existing criminal divisions and the Major Economic Crime Investigation Unit received a combined 43,221 non-referral and suspended-investigation cases, an average of 3,602 a month. That accounted for 73% of the 59,224 such cases received by the office as a whole over the same period.
The new divisions will also take over the screening and processing of warrants requested by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, work previously handled by the Human Rights Protection Division. The aim is to support police investigations by applying uniform standards to warrants in high-profile cases while screening out coercive investigative measures that could infringe on rights. Warrants requested by individual police stations, however, along with those in specialized areas such as sexual violence, will continue to be handled by the relevant criminal divisions and dedicated units.
"We will do our utmost to ensure that no crime victim is left aggrieved by cases being buried or by shoddy investigations," an official at the Seoul Central District Prosecution Office said.