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Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung attends a party Supreme Council meeting at the National Assembly on Nov. 15, 2024. (Kim Gyoung-ho/Hankyoreh)

On Tuesday, South Korea’s prosecutors indicted Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung on charges of using a corporate credit card for personal purposes during his time as governor of Gyeonggi Province. This is the sixth indictment of Lee to date since President Yoon Suk-yeol took office. 

Under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, the prosecutors have pursued focused investigations and indictments against Lee, the leader of the top opposition party and a strong contender to run in the next presidential election. This additional indictment came on the heels of a court ruling last week finding Lee guilty of violating election law.

Never under any previous administration have we seen investigations and indictments that were so blatantly targeted.

In 2022, the police investigated the corporate credit card case but decided not to press charges, having failed to discover any link between the personal use and Lee.

But the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission made the decision last year to refer the case to the prosecution service, insisting that it needed to be investigated, and the prosecutors assigned a dedicated team to pursue a renewed investigation. This included searches and seizures not only on the Gyeonggi Provincial Office but also on hundreds of other places where the card in question was used, including laundries, fruit shops, and restaurants.

In a country where the rule of law applies, no politician is above the law. At the same time, the law also needs to be applied in a fair and neutral way.

Here in South Korea, we have prosecutors with the power to conduct sweeping investigations to find any possible basis for pursuing an indictment. When these massive investigation and indictment powers are used to target a particular politician, it poses a risk of distorting the democratic political process.

This is why there is so much emphasis on the prosecutors upholding political neutrality as if their lives depended on it and avoiding even giving the appearance that their neutrality is suspect.

But these days, the prosecutors don’t seem particularly concerned about fairness or political neutrality. At this point, they do not appear to even take the public’s attitudes into account.

Previously, they incurred the public’s wrath with their successive decisions not to press charges over first lady Kim Keon-hee’s acceptance of a luxury handbag as a gift or her suspected involvement in Deutsch Motors stock price manipulations. The Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission, for its part, decided not to pursue charges on the handbag case, concluding that there had been “no violations,” but it did opt to refer the corporate card case to the prosecutors.

The same prosecutors who exhaustively investigated Lee’s corporate card use for their indictment have also continued to conceal the use of tens of billions of won of their own “special activity funds” and “special duty expenses.” This has included defying court rulings ordering its disclosure and denying National Assembly requests to submit details.

In light of those circumstances, they leave themselves vulnerable to accusations that their investigations and indictments of Lee Jae-myung have lost any semblance of fairness.

Things have reached the point where some observers are speculating that this flurry of “see what sticks” indictments is really meant to drag Lee’s image through the mud while rallying support from the administration’s conservative base.

In any event, the prosecutors’ actions have the potential to damage the public’s trust in their fairness and political neutrality, which could end up threatening the rule of law itself. That is deeply concerning indeed.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]