[Editorial] Disturbing scene of human rights infringements

Whenever prosecutors and police are embroiled with the controversies that they violated human rights, their typical defense has always been that their conduct at issue has been a customary practice in their profession, and that it was neither unlawful nor against their professional code of conduct. In a somewhat defying tone, they usually retort that they can do within the confines of law whatever they like to do for their investigative purposes.

Their attitude appears to suggest that they do not particularly care about the possibilities of human rights infringements in their investigative process. In fact, what is unfolding before us now is such a recurring situation of the right violations.

Police's human rights violations are usually perpetrated under the pretext of lawful investigations. Their recent interrogation of some arrested unionist teachers in their birth suit represents a typical case of such right violations. Police arrested the unionist teachers who were staging demonstrations in front of the government's office building complex, calling for the early implementation of the union's negotiated agreements with the government.

The reason for the arrest given by the police was that the teachers' demonstrations were a special offence of interfering with the government officials' performance of duties. They say that the internal directives of the National Police Agency empower them, if the need be, to make body checks of suspects in their birth suit before detainment when they arrested criminal offenders right on the spot.

But, the people they arrested this time were no other than teachers. Suspects' body searches in their birth suit may be relevant to the criminals like narcotic traffickers but certainly not for teachers. In our judgment, this constitutes a serious case of human rights infringements on the teachers, no matter how lawfully the police conducted such body checks on the teachers.

Moreover, the unionist teachers claim that police cursed them and forced them to fingerprinting. If the teachers' allegations are authenticated, the policemen involved in the case must be severely reprimanded. The punishment of the policemen must independently be dealt here as a separate issue from the teachers¡¯ unlawful conducts.

In the wake of President Kim Dae-Jung's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, a series of measures for human rights improvements are being taken, such as the dissolution of the Sajik-dong ad-hoc police squad (Presidential special police taskforce) as well as the ruling party's move to enact human rights laws. Such encouraging moves notwithstanding, there are still unceasing controversies over human rights violations which seem to tell us lamentable state of our present human right situations.

Human rights violations of our investigating officials have a rather long history. The abuse of the special powers by police and prosecutors to urgently arrest suspects under extenuating circumstances without a court's warrant has given rise to un-ending cases of human rights violations in the disguise of a lawful procedure.

The introduction of the urgent arrest system was meant to be an exception to the principle of arrest on a court's warrant. But, the system is abused so much that arrests on a court's writ are becoming exceptional. In fact, the statistics indicate that the cases of urgent arrests without the writ represent ten times higher than the arrests on court's warrant. In addition, human rights infringements are also of serious proportion due to the government agencies' limitless abuse of people's bank accounts' probes as well as eavesdropping.

Also lamentable are our prosecution officials' insensitivity to, and abuse of, human rights. Some 20 percent of the suspects were found to be not guilty by courts because prosecutors' investigations were inadequate and their application of laws against the suspects were erroneous. There are many people who claim that they are victims of prosecutors' coercive investigations as to incur psychological and financial damages to them.

No matter how splendid our institutional devices are for the guarantee of human rights, we can hardly expect any real improvements on our human rights situations from such institutional arrangements alone. Changes for the improvement must be made foremost at concrete places where actual human rights violations are taking place.

The government must introduce the fundamental measures for human rights improvements with its special attention paid to concrete situations where actual rights violations occur. The revision of relevant laws and appropriate organizational provisions necessary for the rights guarantee appear equally imperative.