[Column]Systemic Political Reform Needed

These days, by reading the leading articles in newspapers, we sense that we are living in a chaotic society full of conflict and a system of values which has collapsed. An astronomical amount of public funds has been poured into the restructuring of the financial sector. But citizens, who have undertaken the entire burden, never accurately know how those funds have been used. Rather, people have never stopped doubting the morality of the public service authorities and those executives of financial institutions who have been responsible for restructuring, using the enormous sums of money entrusted to them. In addition, the recent bribery scandal at the Financial Supervisory Service, the watchdog leading the restructuring, fueled even more doubts.

It is time for us to say that the framework of democratization has been completed in our society, since military rule has ended and a peaceful change in administration between ruling and opposition parties has been accomplished. But whenever we encounter serious problems, we are again reminded that the transparency of our society needs to be improved.

The only comfort is the amount of public criticism that has been reflected in the press. Every sector of our society has offered suggestions to resolve the irregularities. No one believes in the determination of the executives of the Financial Supervisory Service to reform themselves voluntarily. Moreover, the situation has become far too serious to ever be resolved by strengthening internal control in administrative ministries.

For the long-term development of our society, a resolution of the symptoms of decay should start from improvement of the system itself. The system should be reformed to confirm constitutionalism and to revive the checks and balances between power groups under the principles of democracy.

The National Assembly's hearings are a good example of the checks and balances between the government branches. Every year, the people receive new and astonishing information through such National Assembly hearings. Moreover, lawmakers finally get to raise their voices to ask the administration about issues that the entire nation has been wondering about.

Even though modern countries tend to be led by administrative bodies, we seriously doubt if the practice of legislative rights has only been for the sake of formality. Although the National Assembly exercises legislative rights, the government proposes most of the legislation. It is no exaggeration to say that administrative ministries lead the procedures of law-making. When the administration leads law-making, its measures tend to focus on the convenience of regulators. Many of those laws and regulations, which were not filtered appropriately by the National Assembly, do not provide a transparent standard to the people.

Public service authorities in charge of enforcement have been granted too much power of interpretation and discretion. In some cases, idealistic － and almost unrealistic － laws turn most people into violators. It is not difficult to find that those laws loosen the public's sentiment toward observing laws.

Without the proper exercise of legislative powers, checks and balances, the most important factor in the separation and independence of political power, can never be accomplished. Not many people would expect that hearings at the National Assembly, which are conducted only once a year, would be enough to check our society in a timely and appropriate way.

We are currently doing our best to restructure the management structure of the chaebol. The intent is to reinforce the rights of minority shareholders and revive the function of supervision in order to let managers run their companies with full responsibilities. Now it is time to recheck our system. It is time to assure the National Assembly and the electorate that the administration can be effectively supervised in order to maintain the balance of power.

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By Shin Hi-taek

The writer is a lawyer at the Kim & Chang Law Firm.