The Constitutional Court spent about 81 million won ($58,000) on trips to Germany and Spain after the launch of the system allowing constitutional appeals against court rulings, but the trips largely confirmed problems that the legal community had warned about repeatedly, according to documents obtained by this newspaper. Six months after the system took effect, related cases had piled up to 2,310, with 156 requests for retrial of dismissal decisions. Critics say the court is now burning through budget and administrative resources because it began operating the system without adequately addressing its structural gaps.
According to the court's overseas travel report and case-handling data, obtained on the 29th by Seoul Economic Daily through the office of Rep. Kim Min-jeon of the People Power Party, six people including Justices Ma Eun-hyuk and Oh Young-jun visited Spain and Germany from July 5 to 15. The 10-day trip cost 80.895 million won. The group visited the constitutional courts of both countries and examined the system as a whole, from how such appeals are screened to rulings on the merits and the procedures that follow the cancellation of a ruling.
The problem is that many of the key tasks identified in the 108-page report had been flagged by legal experts multiple times before the system took effect. The court concluded that South Korea lacks specific legal standards for referring such appeals to the full bench. It also stated that "research on follow-up procedures is needed" on questions such as how far up the appellate ladder the cancellation of a ruling takes effect and to which court a case should be remanded.
The dispute over creating a "fourth level of trial," which flared when the system was introduced, resurfaced as an unresolved task on this trip. Germany in principle defers to the fact-finding and legal interpretation of ordinary courts and hears only cases that require a constitutional judgment. Spain uses whether a case carries "special constitutional significance" as the test for accepting it. By contrast, the delegation found that South Korea lacks specific referral standards to screen cases.
While the court belatedly looked abroad for ways to patch the system, the number of such appeals surged at home. By the court's count, 2,310 related cases were filed from the system's launch in March through the end of August. Of those, 2,099, or 90.9%, were dismissed at the screening panel stage. While 184 cases remain under review at screening panels, only 19, or 0.8%, were referred to the full bench.
The added costs of handling the growing caseload are substantial. The court increased staff by 36 to respond to the appeals and leased an annex at about 980 million won a year to secure working space. Reporting by this newspaper also confirmed that, to reduce long-term rental costs, the court is pursuing an 8.7 billion won expansion on the site of a tennis court within its compound.
(Related article: Seoul Economic Daily, Sept. 21, Page 22)
Requests for retrial of appeals already dismissed have also followed one after another. A total of 156 were filed, of which 126 were dismissed again, while the remaining 30 are under review. Separately, across all such appeals, cases took an average of 17.1 days from filing to dismissal and an average of 19.7 days to referral to the full bench.
Among the grounds for dismissal, a striking share of cases failed to meet the requirements for filing. A total of 909 cases fell outside the scope of what can be challenged in the first place. Other grounds of inadmissibility accounted for the largest number at 913, while 221 cases missed the filing deadline and 56 had not gone through other remedies.
By case type, the unusually high number of appeals tied to criminal trials is a cause for concern. Of the 2,310 total, 1,521, or 65.8%, were criminal cases. If such an appeal is accepted in the future and a final criminal ruling is canceled, questions over follow-up procedures could become real, including which court would retry the case and how a sentence already served would be handled.
Experts commonly pointed out that these problems were entirely foreseeable before the system took effect. Cha Jin-a, a professor at Korea University Law School, said, "That such appeals would flood in, and that the Constitutional Court lacked the capacity to handle them, was something we clearly warned about before the launch," criticizing the court for failing to put in place admissibility requirements, preliminary screening procedures, and staff and organization in advance.
The timing of the trip, undertaken only after the system had already begun operating, has also drawn criticism. Hwang Do-soo, a lawyer and former constitutional research officer, said, "It is questionable what they intended to accomplish by going abroad after the system had already been implemented," calling it "irresponsible legislation that gave no thought at all to what the public was thinking."
Rep. Kim Min-jeon said, "It was a useless trip that did nothing more than reconfirm problems already pointed out, after the system was rushed into place," adding, "Now that the high dismissal rate and the procedural gaps have been confirmed, we need to coldly assess whether the current system can function properly as a means of protecting citizens' rights, and if necessary, revisit whether to keep it at all."
