The politics of prosecution service reform in new presidential democracies: The South Korea and Russia cases in comparative perspective

Abstract

This paper explains why large-scale reform of a civil-law prosecution system will be abandoned, fail, or succeed in exceptional cases, focusing on the strategic interaction between an incumbent president and prosecutors, through a comparative analysis of the South Korea and Russia cases. A civil-law prosecution system could hardly be reformed, although there were several attempts to correct the politicization of the prosecution service, in new presidential democracies. An incumbent president sometimes considers major reform against the prosecutors, but he or she tends to abandon it and seek to form alliance with them, expecting short-term political benefits under intense political competition. Moreover, although a president strongly pushes for large-scale prosecution service reform, he or she also cannot easily achieve this goal, since the prosecutors' willful initiation of criminal proceedings will cause his or her momentum to decline. Indeed, only Putin exceptionally succeeded in major reform of the prosecution system under weak political competition, among South Korean and Russian Presidents after democratization.

Models of the Early Stages of Criminal Justice and Ensuring Access to Justice in a Digital Environment

“…Various procedural aspects of optimization of preliminary proceedings are analyzed: which state body (court, prosecutor, police) should carry out pre-trial investigation and what should be the balance of powers of these bodies [2][3][4][5][6], stages of investigation are studied [7], it is proposed establishment of simple and effective procedures at the initial stage of criminal procedural activity (including refusal to initiate a criminal case, which is traditional for the states of the post-Soviet space, as an independent stage, often turning into quasi-investigation) [8], [9].…”

Politización mediática de la justicia en Ecuador. Estudio de caso: Ecuavisa

“…Politización mediática de la justicia en Ecuador... Y por consecuencia, es probable que los fiscales abandonen su resistencia contra el presidente, lo que deriva la aceptación de cambios, incluso desfavorables que se les impongan (Lee, 2016). Por su parte, Maravall (como se citó en Lee, 2016) sostiene que en la práctica, un Gobierno en ejercicio ha explotado a menudo los poderes de los funcionarios judiciales para objetivos partidistas-proselitistas, como por ejemplo la eliminación de sus oponentes políticos, en muchas democracias modernas.…”