At a Supreme Court forum, participants said that under the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, now in its third year, criminally punishing business owners of companies where serious accidents occurred does not lead to improvements in corporate culture that prevent accidents.
The Sentencing Commission's research group said on the 16th that it held a symposium titled "Punishment and sentencing for serious accidents" in the main auditorium on the first floor of the Supreme Court on the 15th. The event discussed reasonable and effective sentencing guidelines based on cases accumulated since the Serious Accidents Punishment Act took effect on Jan. 27, 2022, and on foreign legal systems.
Kim Hea-kyung, a professor in the department of police administration at Keimyung University and a member of the Sentencing Commission, presented a comparison between the United Kingdom's 2007 Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act and the Serious Accidents Punishment Act. The U.K. defines serious accidents caused by corporations as "corporate manslaughter," among other terms, and applies set sentencing guidelines.
Professor Kim said, "In both the U.K. and Korea, punishment does not actually lead to improvements in corporate culture, showing the limits of a criminal-punishment-centered approach," adding, "It is difficult to prove organizational negligence, which makes investigation and prosecution burdensome." Kim also said that punishing both individuals and corporations raises a double punishment issue.
Professor Kim added, "To prevent innocent disasters caused by violations of corporations' safety and health obligations, we need serious reflection on whether punishment alone is truly the only solution."
Senior Judge Kim Hee-soo of the Goyang branch of the Uijeongbu District Court said, "A core framework of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act is not only punishing individuals such as management responsibility holders, but also strictly punishing the corporation itself under joint penal provisions."
Prosecutor Kim Beom-jun of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office said, "We need to improve the sentencing framework so that 'punishment' can lead to a virtuous cycle of real 'prevention,'" adding, "For small businesses, compliance with government policies and guidelines should be the focus, while for large corporations, whether they have built an effective safety system should be the key sentencing factor."
Ryu Ho-yeon, a policy investigator at The National Assembly's Legislation and Judiciary Committee, said, "It is questionable whether we can fully adopt the U.K.-style system of directly imposing fines on corporations with no upper limit." The reason, Ryu said, is that Korea's criminal law system, unlike the U.K.'s, denies corporate criminal capacity.
Senior Judge Beom Sun-yun of the Suncheon branch of the Gwangju District Court said, "We should be cautious about treating a worker's simple carelessness, or the fact that a worker knew the risks of a work method, as factors favorable to the defendant."
Kwon O-sung, a professor at Yonsei University Law School, said, "Sentencing guidelines should focus more on 'whether corporations had systems to prevent accidents' than on 'whether an accident occurred.'" Kwon added, "In the long term, we should explore a model that treats the corporation itself as the actor and considers all corporate-attributable violations in sentencing."