“Suspects must be Held under the Reclassified Incarceration Standard”
NHRC Recommends that the Minister of Justice Amend the ‘Guidelines for Incarceration and Supervising Suspects of Organized Crime Ring-related Offenses’ (04-09-2003)
The National Human Rights Commission(NHRC) concluded that “if the written indictment has been revised, [the person held in custody] must be held according to the reclassification” relating to the September 2002 complaint against the head of the Seoul Detention Center and issued a recommendation to the Minister of Justice that clause 2 of article 3 of the “Guidelines for Incarcerating and Supervising Suspects of Organized Crime Ring-related Offenses” (5 June 2002 Enforcement Regulation Number 633) be amended. The complaint originated when Mr. Kim (age 36) charged that he “suffered disadvantage because even though the written indictment against me had been changed, the detention center continued to classify me as a violent criminal.”
The NHRC investigation found that Mr. Kim had been incarcerated in Seoul Detention Center under arraignment charges of violations relating to the “Act on the Aggravated Punishment, Etc. of Specific Crimes” in April 2002, but at indictment stage, the prosecutor amended the charges, dropping charges of “constituting a criminal organization” and changing them to fraud. Regardless, the Seoul Detention Center still classified Kim as a violent criminal, incarcerated him in facilities together with violent criminals, made him wear a yellow name tag, which indicates violent criminal classification, and had him appear before appellate court in handcuffs.
In turn, the Seoul Detention Center side argued that “in cases where we had been supervising an organized crime-ring suspect, and the sentence (care and custody) passed on him or her does not fall under clause 1 or clause 5 of article 2, then we acknowledge that as reason to revoke [the “violent criminal” classification] and the head of the detention center consolidates the revocation after the matter has passed through a Classification and Treatment Meeting. The center side also presented clause 2 of article 3 (Revocation of the designation “organized crime ring-related”) of the “Guidelines for Incarcerating and Supervising Suspects of Organized Crime Ring-related Offenses” as evidence, maintaining: “we can only reclassify the inmate after his or her sentencing has been finalized.”
In consideration of the facts—the fact that although Kim’s arraignment charges included “constituting a criminal organization” at the time KIM was sent to the detention center, at the indictment stage such charges were dropped; the fact that the report on the complaint filer stated that the complaint filer’s name was “not on the organized crime ring roster maintained by the Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Seoul Public Prosecutor’s office”; and the fact that there were no grounds whatsoever for classifying Kim as an organized crime-ring suspect after the contestation of the arraignment—the NHRC concluded that “the Seoul Detention Center’s waiting for a final sentence to be meted instead of immediately reclassifying custody of Kim is something that contains the strong possibility of human rights violation.”
Additionally, the NHRC noted that the question of whether the charges of constituting a criminal organization were included or not, that classification and supervision as a member of an organized crime was completely exercised by the prosecutor and Seoul Detention Center and that these bore no relation to the complaint filer, and concluded that “in view of the principle that administration must be accountable for its own actions, the administrative agency bears responsibility for making the appropriate rectifications when a suspect’s indictment has been amended.”
