The National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) decides that it is discrimination that the Prosecutor’s Office notifies the person with hearing disability the request of the attendance via text message whose sender number is normal phone number.
NHRCK thus recommended the Head of Prosecutor’s Office to devise a comprehensive improvement plan in order to provide proper service for persons with disability at each level of investigation including attendance request, interrogation and result notification by taking into consideration their type and level of disability.
The petitioner Mr. Kim (53) who has hearing disability filed a petition before NHRCK on August 2010 claiming that “On 3 August 2010, I received a request of attendance from the “A” branch of the Prosecutor’s Office for interrogation of a case of injury and violence via text message whose sender was a landline phone. Since the sender number was a regular phone instead of mobile, I had to ask my friend to call them to figure out what I need to know the next day rather than me asking them related questions directly at that day,”
With regards to this claim, the Prosecutor’s Office said that they will improve the relevant process in the future so that the person with hearing disability could contact their office directly for their right of statement although the office already has a “Guideline for the Protection of Rights of Persons with Disabilities”.
NHRCK notes that even though the “A” branch recognized the petitioner had difficulty to communicate, they informed him to come to the “A” branch by means which the petitioner could not respond on his own. As a result, the petitioner had no option other than relying on someone else to ask relevant questions. Especially, investigation-related allegation is much closely linked to one’s privacy which the petitioner had to reveal to another person merely to communicate with the “A” branch.
On the other hand, the Prosecutor’s Office insists that sending a text message to a person concerned with a phone number of prosecutor or investigator may cause unnecessary misunderstanding. However, notifying a person concerned does not have to include public servant’s mobile number but a mobile number in common use or a text message could introduce an email address for the further communication. In this regard, NHRCK does not see any excessively overloaded work or difficult situation for the Prosecutor’s Office to provide an alternative.
Therefore, NHRCK recommended the Head of Prosecutor’s Office to come up with a comprehensive improvement plan to provide convenience for persons with disability taking into consideration the level of their disability at every level of investigation.
