According to the plan, the ministry will replace or duplicate every paper necessary for the legal process, such as arrest warrants and written evidence, with electronic data. Also it will endow multimedia data, such as human voice or video images, with the validity to be used as evidence in the legal process. The law-enforcement ministry said it will also create provisions to obligate each government organization to share administrative information.
"Because the relevant ministries haven’t allowed other organizations to share information of foreigners or immigration, much unnecessary money has been spent,’’ said an official at the justice ministry.
A time delay often occurs because information about issuing ID cards from Korean diplomatic and consular offices in foreign countries fail to be shared with the Immigration Bureau. It will improve the law on the immigration procedure to share the relevant information quickly, the ministry said.
For effective management of foreigners in Korea, the ministry said it will standardize the management of foreigners’ personnel information, which are different from each related-ministry. In addition, it will mark the foreigners’ name following the international naming rule, ICAO Doc 9303, the ministry said.
According the plan, the court will not be exempt from the information sharing initiative. The ministry said it will come up with a measure to set up an data transference system between the court and prosecution. Even the transcript of each ruling will be accessible to the two legal parties, the ministry said.
It also said it will revise the commerce law to issue an electronic bill of lading (B/L) which will be recognized equivalent to B/L and will make a stipulation allowing people to apply for registration over the Internet.
These plans of the justice ministry are expected to be supported by the Korean government, which is seeking to be ``best e-government’’ in the world. The government also announced yesterday its plan for incorporation the servers of all the government organizations.
Though the Korean government has been a known efficient e-government, it has experienced many problems. More than half central administrative buildings are equipped with a computer operation room of less than only 30 pyong (100 square meters) and the average number of operating servers of them is 1.8, much less than 11.3 of larger companies. Also, 49 percent of the national major information systems experienced error more than once a month with 43 percent of them with glitches remaining unsolved for longer than 30 minutes a month.
According to the government, it will build up a government computer center incorporating all the electronic resources by 2007. In addition, the government will give incentives for management and operation to organizations that move into the center first.
Once built, the computer center will save around 1.4 trillion won and will create 1.1 trillion won worth of economic output, the government expected.
Autor: Moon Gwang-lip
Quelle: The Korea Times, 15.09.2004
