The Ministry of Justice will launch South Korea's new Public Prosecution Service with fewer prosecutors than originally planned. The agency will begin operations on Oct. 2 with 80% to 85% of the current authorized headcount, and the legal ceiling itself will be lowered later. Legal experts say the ministry focused on shrinking the organization under pressure from hard-liners in the ruling party without adequately weighing the confusion and caseload burden the agency will face in its early months.
Lee Eung-chul, head of the ministry's prosecution bureau, told a briefing at the Gwacheon government complex on the 22nd that the agency would "start at 80% to 85% of the ceiling set under the current Prosecutors' Quota Act, excluding routine vacancies and those seconded to the courts." With the current ceiling at 2,292, that translates to roughly 1,834 to 1,948 prosecutors at launch. Revisions to the organizational decree for the Public Prosecution Service and its affiliates, along with amendments to the enforcement decree of the Prosecutors' Quota Act, were approved at a Cabinet meeting the same day.
The exact size of the cut to the legal ceiling will be determined after the agency launches. The ministry plans to commission an outside institution early next year to analyze the agency's workload and assess its structure to calculate an appropriate number of prosecutors. It will then consult the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and the National Assembly, with the aim of revising the Prosecutors' Quota Act during next year's regular parliamentary session.
Staffing will also shift away from criminal divisions toward trial divisions. Prosecutors will be assigned to match the 331 criminal trial benches under the jurisdiction of 18 regional prosecution offices nationwide, establishing a system of one trial prosecutor per bench. About 170 trial prosecutors currently work at the 18 district prosecutors' offices that have trial divisions.
The organization will shrink further. Two deputy chief prosecutor-level planning offices at the agency's headquarters — the criminal affairs planning office and the serious crimes planning office — will be abolished, and the number of units dedicated to cases police decline to refer to prosecutors will be cut to 13 from a planned 19 nationwide. The "judicial control division," whose name President Lee Jae-myung had criticized as inappropriate, will be renamed the "non-referral review division," while the "serious crimes division" becomes the "serious crimes indictment division."
Pressure from ruling party hard-liners drove the sweeping revision of the organizational plan just 10 days before the agency's launch. The ministry had earlier drafted a plan that maintained the existing number of prosecutors, but hard-liners in the Democratic Party of Korea criticized it as a retreat from prosecution reform. After President Lee ordered a review, saying there was "no need to be bound by the existing Prosecutors' Quota Act," the ministry backed away from its earlier position.
Legal experts, however, say the measure overlooks the agency's role in checking investigative bodies and the workload it will carry at the outset. They argue that substantial staffing is needed for newly introduced procedures — including fact-checking to decide whether to bring charges and cooperation with and support for judicial police — to take hold. If prosecutors' supplementary investigation powers are fully abolished, the volume of requests for supplementary investigation directed at police and other front-line investigative agencies is also expected to rise.
Concerns are particularly acute that sharply expanding trial division staffing could weaken criminal divisions' capacity to process cases. With front-line prosecutors each carrying hundreds of pending cases, an abrupt reallocation of personnel could deepen the backlog. As of August, pending cases at prosecutors' offices nationwide totaled 165,000.
The ministry acknowledges the problem. "If too many people are assigned to trial divisions, criminal divisions could end up short-handed for cases referred by police," Lee said. "We will adjust actual working numbers with that in mind to prevent a pileup of pending cases."
The vacancy at the top is another source of instability at launch. With Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won withdrawing on the 19th, the process of selecting the first head of the Public Prosecution Service has effectively stalled. The appointment of Lee Jung-hyun, head of the Suwon High Prosecutors' Office, as acting prosecutor general the same day averted an "acting for the acting" arrangement, but the leadership selection for the new agency remains unclear. With the organization and its staffing shrinking at the same time as the top post sits empty, critics warn that disruption in the early months could grow.
One senior prosecutor said: "Once you exclude those on leave and the most senior prosecutors, the number actually handling cases is far smaller than the figures suggest. If staffing is cut to match political demands before the new system has even been tried, it will end in case backlogs and a weaker check on investigative agencies."
