Law Proposed to Reveal Faces of Heinous Criminals

The government and the ruling Grand National Party yesterday said they will introduce a bill to post the faces of criminals committing heinous crimes to the public.

Party members belonging to the National Assembly’s Public Administration and Security Committee and officials from the National Police Agency held a government-ruling party meeting at parliament.

They decided to enact soon the tentatively named “Act on Opening Brutal Criminals’ Faces to the Public.”

Participants at the meeting said the government needs to reconsider internal regulations that prevent police from revealing the faces of such criminals to the public in the wake of a series of brutal crimes.

Police official Lee Gil-beom said, “We’ll make laws to expose the faces of brutal criminals to the public to deter crime.”

The National Police Agency has asked the Korean Institute of Criminology to examine legal issues and conduct a survey on precedents in other nations.

The faces of suspects in violent crimes had been released to the public before the 1990s. The National Human Rights Commission urged police to keep the faces of suspects confidential in 2005, and police obliged.

The government and the ruling party will discuss later how much information about suspects will be released and what kind of criminals will be subject to the new regulations, including serial killers, habitual child molesters and others.

Police also said they will raise the number of experienced profilers, dispatch more officers to southwestern Gyeonggi Province, and build more police boxes and security cameras there.

gaea@donga.com