형사사법과 인권 분야에서 민주화와 법치화의 추세(1987~2007)

The 1987 Civil Uprising was a turning point away from the age of authoritarian regime which had dominated the Korean civil society. Military government gave up its iron fists, and democratic transition has been on the process. Now, Korea consolidated its democratic institutions, and the check-and-balance system between power organs has been worked. In the field of criminal justice, the first target was to secure the judicial independence from the power politics. The social control agencies based on the rationale of national security has lost their extraordinary power. Torture and illegal arrest have been withered. Political abuse of death penalty was an ancient episode, and now its execution has been suspended since 1998. The most conspicuous change happened in the sphere of detention and imprisonment. The abuse of detention was diminished, and the rate of imprisonment was gradually diminished. When a citizen wants to make a complaint, (s)he finds that much more judicial remedies are now available: a constitutional complaint, a petition to the Minister of Justice, and a complaint to the National Human Rights Institution. So far as the “manifest" human rights issues are concerned, one can safely say that Koreans are now living in a quite different world compared with the twenty years ago. On the other hand, human rights for minority has been little advanced. Religious minority like “conscientious objection to the militiary service" go to the prison. Hebeas corpus has yet to widen its scope of implementation to the various private sectors of internment. We can say the more conspicuous advances has been recorded in the sphere of the violations of human rights, but there remains a long way to achieve the better conditions for the minority in its various meaning. One alternative is to develop more plural democracy based on the principle of tolerance and diversity.