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초록

Nowadays public prosecution services(PPS) in Korea are confronted with a crisis of legitimacy in their activities. Whereas the past criticism was mainly focused on the prosecutors’ non-prosecution or ‘target prosecution’ in the political corruption cases, now there are more concerns about the excessive and active use of prosecution power against the critics of government policies. This paper aims to review and disclose the political biases of PPS activities through legal discourse analysis. Many articles emphasize that the control over the power of PPS should be strengthened in order to achieve the independency of PPS from the political power. However, this paper pays more attention to the discourse power of PPS, that is, PPS as an agency of legal discourse power have an authority to define a social matter as special ‘crime’, where the dominant political discourse is reflected into the legal discourse of PPS. And it is important in this paper that the legal discourse of PPS is more and more related to the political-ecomonic ideology of neo-liberalism. The characteristics of legal discourse of PPS are followings. Firstly, the ‘law and order policy’ of new government declares ‘zero-tolerance’ and strict prosecution policy, which results in excessive and strict control over critical expressions of citizens opposed to the government and ‘ruling class’. Secondly, ‘risk’ of collective activities, such as rally, assembly, strike of labor union, is usually overestimated as harmful to the economic development, although they should be regarded as a democratic expression. Thirdly, ‘public good’ is regarded only as private interest of large number of people. the original meaning of ‘public interest’ which exists in the context of democracy is disappearing in legal discourse of PPS. Conclusions : this paper suggests that we should disclose the anti-democratic legal discourse of PPS, and that we should make every efforts to develop counter-discourse based upon democratic principles and human rights of citizen.

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