The article discusses an upcoming meeting of the Warrant Review Committee, which will assess the appropriateness of the prosecution’s decision to reject arrest warrants requested by the police for Kim Sung-hoon, Deputy Chief of the Presidential Security Service, and Lee Kwang-woo, Chief of the Security Headquarters. The police had their requests for arrest warrants denied three times by the Seoul Western District Prosecutors’ Office, prompting them to apply for the committee’s review.
The Warrant Review Committee, composed entirely of external experts from the legal, academic, and media fields, will deliberate on whether the refusal of the arrest warrants was justified. The process involves randomly selecting 10 committee members from a pool of 20 to 50 candidates.
The police plan to present their case, highlighting factors such as concerns over evidence destruction, given past incidents like the refusal to execute a search warrant for a secure phone server allegedly used to communicate with President Yoon during a declared martial law.
Previously, out of 16 cases reviewed by similar committees across the country since their establishment in January 2021, only one case supported the police’s request for a warrant. However, despite the committee’s recommendation, the localized court in Gwangju still dismissed the warrant, resulting in no successful arrests from police submissions to date.