The ousting of a popular government official in Seoul last month was linked to Korean laws that bar many workers from engaging in political activity. A draconian system known as the “prosecutor republic” helps conservative elites maintain their power.
Members from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) participate in a protest against of the government’s labor policies on May 31, 2023, in Seoul, South Korea. (Chris Jung / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
A ruling by South Korea’s Supreme Court in early September upheld a suspended sentence against Cho Hee-yeon, the popular superintendent of Seoul’s Metropolitan Office of Education and a progressive sociologist and civil society leader.
Cho is known for his efforts to expand free school meals, protect student rights, and limit private high schools. The ruling forced him to resign from his position, one akin to education minister for a city of nearly ten million people.
The removal of Cho is an injustice that speaks volumes about the present-day Korean power structure. Decades after the formal end of military rule, Korean workers still face stifling legal constraints on their freedom to engage in political activity. This is one of many obstacles facing the Korean left as it struggles to maintain a presence in national politics.
A Political Crime
What was the nature of Cho’s crime? He was charged under the Public Official Election Act in 2021 with abusing his power by helping to rehire five teachers from the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) who had previously faced charges under the same act. One was accused of posting defamatory messages on online message boards during the 2002 presidential elections (and subsequently pardoned), while the remaining four were sanctioned for collecting donations to support a candidate in the 2008 superintendent elections.
Decades after the formal end of military rule, Korean workers still face stifling legal constraints on their freedom to engage in political activity.
The original cases highlighted the limits on Korean workers’ freedom of association rights. Korea is one of the few countries that prohibit teachers from joining parties, supporting candidates, and expressing their political opinions publicly. Korea’s former conservative president Park Geun-hye effectively banned the KTU in 2014 for retaining dismissed teachers as members, rendering it an “illegal organization” for almost seven years, despite criticism from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and other international bodies.
A Supreme Court ruling eventually restored the union’s legal status in 2020. Park herself was impeached during the Candlelight Revolution of 2016–17 for a string of scandals and authoritarian political maneuverings involving Korea’s large conglomerates (the chaebol), former prosecutors, and close confidantes.
To help address the issue of the dismissed teachers, Cho sought legal advice on rehiring them and took the principled opinion that it was fair to consider their applications through a special recruitment process in 2019. Despite his indictment on charges that this process was illegal, Cho’s overall record as education superintendent was validated when he was one of the few prominent progressives to be reelected in the 2022 local elections, in his case for a third time.
Prosecutor Republic
Cho’s case is symptomatic of a deeper struggle that involves the power of a conservative bloc in Korean politics and the struggle to put forward a substantive left alternative. It was the first such case to be selected by Korea’s newly established Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials (CIO).
This independent office, established in 2021, was created in the wake of the Candlelight Revolution and #MeToo protests to investigate high-profile cases of corruption, collusion, and wrongdoing. Prominent prosecutors, supported by the conservative opposition, resisted this change as a threat to their autonomy. Many observers saw the targeting of Cho for the CIO’s first case as a sign that the prosecutors were determined to keep control and use their power to frustrate progressive politics.
Cho’s case is symptomatic of a deeper struggle that involves the power of a conservative bloc in Korean politics and the struggle to put forward a substantive left alternative.
Analysts have used the phrase “politics by public security” (공안정국) to describe this brand of politics in Korea, with the “prosecutor republic” (검찰공화국) as its current iteration. Prosecutors have long wielded enormous power over processes of investigation and indictment while maintaining close relations with the media and conservative elites. This is rooted in a legacy that dates back to Korea’s colonial era and the Cold War dictatorships that came after it.
This legal/political nexus helped fuel the Candlelight Revolution and led to efforts by the liberal administration of Moon Jae-in to tackle its power. Ironically, Moon’s reform push ended with the election of a conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol, who hailed from the prosecution service itself. In office, Yoon has appointed former prosecutors who are close to him to prominent positions across his administration, from finance and trade to communications and public administration.
Yoon’s rise was intimately bound up with the politics of prosecution reform during Moon’s administration. Moon sought to put limits on the powers of investigation exercised by prosecutors and transfer greater responsibility for investigations to the police. He also set up the CIO as a special, independent body to handle the investigation and indictment of high-ranking officials.
As Moon’s prosecutor general, Yoon objected to these reforms and eventually resigned in protest. Meanwhile, the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office investigated Moon’s minister of justice, Cho Kuk, who was tasked with overseeing the reform process. The investigation revealed some minor examples of corruption that undermined Moon’s promises to address inequality and challenge the status quo.
Specifically, Cho, a former criminal law professor at Korea’s elite Seoul National University, and his wife (also a professor) were accused of forging documents and using their influence to gain admission for their children to prestigious high schools and universities, among other allegations. Cho’s actions upset many people, especially young voters who resented his behavior and saw it as no different from the conceit and opportunity hoarding of the wealthy elite (who are often called “gold spoons”). As the scandal broke, it seemed hypocritical for Cho to be tasked with institutionalizing Moon’s pledge to create a society where “opportunities are equal, processes are fair, and outcomes are just.”
The fight over prosecution reform devolved into a politics of personality, polarizing around one’s stance toward Cho Kuk himself.
As a result, the fight over prosecution reform devolved into a politics of personality, polarizing around one’s stance toward Cho Kuk himself, who at that time was considered to be Moon’s most likely successor. Cho’s supporters depicted him as a figure who was suffering to keep the Candlelight movement alive, while the conservative bloc pointed to his record as evidence that the Left now represented “vested interests” to be overcome. Cho had participated in a variety of socialist and progressive movements since the 1980s and declared himself to be both a liberal and a socialist in his confirmation hearing.
This focus on Cho’s personal track record helped the conservative bloc to appropriate the rhetoric of “fairness” by shrewdly appointing Yoon as its presidential candidate. The perception of Yoon as an independent prosecutor who was not beholden to the elite enabled the conservative party to rebrand itself.
Yoon had previously led the investigation into Park Geun-hye and had prosecuted several chaebol heads and conservative appointees. An analogy for US politics would be if the Republican Party had selected Robert Mueller as its candidate following his investigation into Russian electoral interference.
Prosecution Reform as Social Reform?
The controversy about Cho obscured the nature and purpose of prosecution reform. As civil society organizations like the Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice pointed out, the planned prosecution reform would do little to advance a comprehensive vision of economic democracy, a slogan on which Moon had long campaigned.
Such critics noted how the conglomerates had long evaded punishment for illegal acts, including bribery and anti-worker policies, due to the failure of the prosecution service to vigorously investigate and indict them. This problem, they argued, could not be fully resolved through prosecution reform without significant reform of the chaebol system itself.
One could make the same criticism of the administration’s half-hearted labor law reforms. Cho Kuk himself pressured unions to help negotiate a flexible working-hours agreement that weakened Moon’s pledges to institute a fifty-two-hour workweek and expand the minimum wage.
The administration also kept in place laws that enabled brutal damage claims against workers for trade union activity. It did not pass comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation, and it took a selective approach to ratifying the core conventions of the ILO on freedom of association and collective bargaining, leaving many restrictions on workers’ rights intact.
Yoon now frequently claims that ‘communist totalitarian’ and ‘anti-state’ forces have disguised themselves as legitimate progressive and human rights activists.
While Cho’s prosecution reforms did eventually pass, the lack of a broader, egalitarian plan for legal reform that might have helped secure stronger political rights for workers left prosecutors with substantial powers that they could use to frustrate progressive demands. If the Moon administration had granted stronger recognition of political rights for teachers and translated the ILO’s conventions into domestic law more effectively, it would have been much more difficult for the authorities to launch cases against teachers and other workers for engaging in political activity. Such cases ultimately led to the ousting of Superintendent Cho.
Yoon’s 2022 presidential run thus benefited from his liberal predecessor’s lack of a comprehensive vision. The brand of “fairness” that Yoon campaigned on has proved to be distinctively anti-egalitarian.
During the election, he promised to disband the Ministry of Gender Equality, claiming that it was unfair to men. This was in spite of Korea’s abysmal record on gender equality, with the worst wage gap between male and female workers in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In office, Yoon ramped up the practice of using damage claims and other punitive measures against workers to suppress strikes while seeking to institute a new sixty-nine-hour working week.
In addition to former prosecutors, Yoon has also appointed several figures from the Korean New Right, who advocate sympathetic views of Japanese colonialism and Korea’s military dictatorships, to head important cultural and social institutions such as the Independence Hall, the Ministry of Employment and Labor, and the National Human Rights Commission. Taking a page from their anti-communist playbook, Yoon now frequently claims that “communist totalitarian” and “anti-state” forces have disguised themselves as legitimate progressive and human rights activists.
A Left Alternative?
Conservative forces were routed in this spring’s legislative elections, turning Yoon into a lame-duck president. However, that does not mean the election was a victory for the Left, whose parties were largely wiped out. An alliance between the Justice and Green Parties failed to win any seats, while the left-nationalist Jinbo (“Progressive”) Party took three seats through an alliance with the Democratic Party (DP), which is now by far the largest parliamentary group.
As Kap Seol has explained, the fate of the left parties was partly because of the sabotage of Korea’s proportional representation voting system under Moon’s tenure to favor satellite parties associated with the dominant players in the National Assembly. This limited the number of seats available for independent minor parties. But many voters who were unhappy with perceived cronyism of DP leader Lee Jae-myung also flocked to a new party created by Cho Kuk.
Conservative forces were routed in this spring’s legislative elections, turning Yoon into a lame-duck president.
The standard English translation of the new group’s name — 조국혁신당 — as the “Rebuilding Korea Party” does not capture its close association with Cho himself. “Cho Kuk” can be read phonetically in Korean as “my country” or “my fatherland,” so a more literal translation would be “Cho Kuk Innovation Party” and/or “My Innovative Country Party.”
The party’s main pledge is to reform the “prosecutorial dictatorship” of the Yoon administration and impeach the president. It presents this issue both as a political goal and as a personal vendetta for the judicial harassment of Cho and his family: his wife served several years in prison, and Cho himself faces jail time in the future if he loses his appeal.
For many observers, the rise of Cho’s party speaks to the lack of a strong left alternative. While the group does include many center-left reformers from the Moon administration, it is mostly populated by figures associated with the so-called Gangnam Left, in reference to the affluent Seoul district. The term conjures up an image of property-owning, university-educated professionals who tend to vote progressive but also benefit from and seek to maintain their elite status.
For the moment, both Cho and the Democratic Party have embraced pro-labor issues. These include a long-awaited revision to protect freedom of association and end punitive damage claims against workers. This is known as the Yellow Envelope Law, after a public campaign in 2014 to help workers pay back such claims. They also talk about creating a “Seventh Republic” through constitutional reforms to expand social rights and popular participation as well as supporting initiatives to secure the political rights of teachers.
The problem is that the promised labor law revision could have easily been carried out when Cho and the DP were in power. The current president will continue to veto such efforts as long as he remains in office. Moreover, Cho and the Democrats have mostly borrowed these progressive policies from the Justice Party, the force they demolished in the recent elections.
Despite its own internal problems and its drift away from labor activism, the Justice Party still has a more egalitarian agenda than Cho’s single-issue force. Its absence from parliamentary politics is sure to leave a void. With Korean politics seemingly anchored in a personality-driven party system, the Left faces the challenge of reconstructing progressive politics along genuinely popular and egalitarian lines.
