On 12 March 2026, Korea’s new crime of “legal distortion” (법왜곡죄) took effect. Judges and prosecutors who intentionally misapply the law to benefit or harm another person now face up to ten years’ imprisonment and suspension of their professional qualifications. The reform comes at a time of fragile public confidence in the judiciary: recent surveys show that trust is shallow and particularly low among younger generations.

Yet this remedy risks deepening the very crisis it purports to address. By criminalising contested legal interpretation and factual analysis, the new offence recasts appellate disagreement as evidence of potential wrongdoing and invites strategic complaints against judges. Instead of restoring trust, it accelerates judicial politicisation and deters independent reasoning, thereby undermining the judiciary’s role as a democratic safeguard.

Background on the crime of “legal distortion”

On 24 February 2026, three judicial reform proposals (사법개혁 3법), favoured by President Lee Jaemyung and the Democratic Party, were introduced in the plenary session of the National Assembly of Korea. These sought to expand the Constitutional Court’s jurisdiction to hear constitutional complaints against court judgments, increase the number of Supreme Court justices from 12 to 24, and criminalise “legal distortion”.

The push for criminalising “legal distortion” in Korea is relatively new. It gained momentum after investigations in 2019 into three Supreme Court justices accused of abusing their authority by interfering in lower court trials. Following President Lee’s election in 2025, his government and the ruling Democratic Party formally introduced the proposed criminal offence.

The judiciary opposed the reform. Both the Supreme Court’s National Court Administration and numerous chief judges expressed concerns about the law’s impact on judicial independence and the rule of law. Despite the controversy, the National Assembly adopted these laws on 26 February 2026, and they entered into force on 12 March 2026.

Eroding public trust in the judiciary

The crime of “legal distortion” risks further eroding public confidence in the judiciary. Two distinct mechanisms are at work: one arising from how the law is already being used, the other from how it is designed.

The first is immediate politicisation. On the very day the law entered into force, President Lee’s attorney filed criminal charges against Supreme Court Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae and Justice Park Young-jae. The complaint alleges that they deliberately distorted the law to revive a case against the President concerning alleged violations of election law in 2021. As supporting evidence, it claims that the justices failed to properly review the court file when deciding whether to reopen proceedings after a lower court had dismissed the case.

This high-profile dispute is not an isolated incident. Since the law took effect, multiple complaints against members of the judiciary have followed, accompanied by threats against judges during court sessions. As one member of the Korean judiciary stated, “we’ve been hit by a hit-and-run vehicle and are in a coma.”

Without anticipating the outcome of these pending proceedings, they already point to a shift in how political actors and the broader public engage with the judiciary. The more frequently politicians and litigants in politically sensitive cases accuse judges of bias or even criminal conduct, the more public trust is likely to erode. This dynamic is not new in Korea, but the offence of “legal distortion” may well accelerate it.

The second mechanism is a structural “chilling effect” – rooted in the law’s own design. The offence applies in three circumstances: when a judge applies or fails to apply a law despite knowing its requirements were not met, in order to benefit or harm another person; and when a judge knowingly destroys or conceals evidence for the same purpose. Importantly, the crime does not apply to “reasonable” legal interpretations.

This exception raises more questions than it resolves. The law offers no definition of what qualifies as “reasonable,” leaving no clear threshold for when a judge’s interpretation falls within the scope of the offence. It is therefore genuinely difficult to predict when a judge’s conduct might become the subject of criminal proceedings.

The elements of the offence are also difficult to establish. Intent, in particular, will often be challenging – if not impossible – to prove: direct evidence of a judge’s motivation will rarely exist. As a result, proceedings will likely compel judges to scrutinise the reasoning and interpretive choices of their colleagues. Such scrutiny is not unusual in appellate review, where higher courts routinely reassess how lower courts interpret and apply the law. What distinguishes “legal distortion” from ordinary appellate oversight is the aim: whereas appellate review seeks to ensure the reasonable interpretation of the law, a criminal prosecution under this offence requires a court not only to identify an alleged error but to infer why a judge reached a particular conclusion.

The uncertainties compound further. Even if a judge’s interpretation were deemed “unreasonable” – and thus potentially subject to criminal proceedings – it remains unclear whether, or how, that “unreasonableness” could be used to prove an unlawful intent to harm or benefit another person. The relationship between interpretive error and criminal motive is simply undefined.

The case initiated by President Lee’s attorney exemplifies this problem directly. It may require a judge to reassess the documents before the Supreme Court with a view to inferring the justices’ intentions from the file alone – without statutory guidance on what counts as unreasonable. Yet, it is widely accepted in law that most fact patterns and legal terms can reasonably sustain more than one interpretation. Without a clear standard, distinguishing a mistaken judgment from a deliberate distortion may be impossible in practice.

Taken together, these uncertainties point in one direction. When judges cannot predict whether a good-faith interpretive choice might expose them to criminal liability, the pressure to decide defensively – or to avoid certain cases altogether – becomes real. That pressure operates regardless of intent, which is precisely what makes it structurally corrosive. Public confidence in the judiciary and a judge’s ability to decide cases free from external interference are cornerstones of judicial independence. By creating an environment in which judges are increasingly targeted for the substance of their judgments, the crime of “legal distortion” may directly undermine both.

Limiting democratic resilience

Undermining judicial independence is problematic not only in itself but also because of its broader repercussions. Courts become less effective at countering threats to democracy once their independence is compromised, because decisions from a judiciary that the public no longer trusts are less likely to be viewed as legitimate. Judgments that lack legitimacy are less likely to be respected. Efforts to challenge executive or legislative abuses of power are therefore less likely to result in meaningful constraints. For Korea, a democracy under pressure, actions that even unintentionally weaken the judiciary must be assessed against this wider risk.

Democracy has only truly flourished in Korea since the constitutional reforms of 1987. Its long-term trajectory remains debated. The last decade alone illustrates both the fragility of Korean democracy and its dependence on robust public institutions. In 2016, Park Geun-hye was impeached for abuse of power and coercion. The Constitutional Court found that the misuse of presidential office “damages the essence of the principles of popular sovereignty and representative democracy.” Less than a decade later, Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in an effort to consolidate his power. Again, in its judgment to remove Yoon from office, the Constitutional Court stressed that the executive’s abuse of power was “seriously endangering the stability of the democratic republic.”

That Korea has weathered these overt challenges to its democratic order is remarkable. The impeachment of two sitting presidents and their subsequent imprisonment testifies to the force of public resistance. It also speaks to the need for strong institutions that will check future abuses of power. Against this background, adopting a law that is likely to further destabilise the Korean judiciary appears not merely imprudent but counterproductive.

Concluding thoughts

Strengthening public trust in the Korean judiciary is a legitimate and pressing concern, and broader debate on how to achieve it is both welcome and necessary. However, the crime of “legal distortion” is not the answer, and its adoption comes at a considerable cost.

The stakes extend beyond the judiciary itself. At a moment when political polarisation is intensifying, and democracy is the subject of growing public contestation, further eroding judicial independence risks weakening one of the institutional pillars on which Korea’s democratic resilience depends. A judiciary perceived as subject to political pressure is ill-equipped to serve as a check on power – precisely when such checks matter most.

The ruling party presents itself as a defender of democracy. If that commitment is sincere, it ought to reconsider its support for legislation that may ultimately do more to hollow out democratic institutions than to strengthen them.