The parliament is set to question Lee Byung-ho, the nominee to lead the National Intelligence Service, on whether he is capable of reforming the agency Monday.
Lee was nominated by President Park Geun-hye last month as part of her partial reshuffle aimed at restoring public confidence over her reform drive. Lee’s predecessor Lee Byung-ki was appointed as Park’s new chief of staff. The nominee is subject to a confirmation hearing, though no parliamentary approval is required.
Lee was widely expected to face a relatively easy hearing, as no major allegations of wrongdoing have been found. But the main opposition party plans to challenge him over his conservative disposition at the session.
“Nominee Lee seems to have excessively conservative (views),” the New Politics Alliance for Democracy said in a statement, adding that it would examine whether he is qualified to remain politically neutral if he becomes the chief of the agency.
In a column written by Lee in 2009, the nominee likened the protests by evictees in a Seoul redevelopment in the district of Yongsan as an “insurrection” and insisted that the enforcement agencies should take the controversial crackdown on them as a lesson to reestablish their authority.
NPAD suggested that some students who heard his lectures at Ulsan University between 2010 and 2014 have described him as strongly politicized and conservative.
The hearing came amid growing demand for a massive reform of the National Intelligence Agency to prevent it from interfering in political affairs.
The NIS has suffered from public distrust after a string of political scandals. The nation’s top spy agency has been accused of interfering in the 2012 presidential election, revealing a transcript of a 2007 inter-Korean summit and fabricating court evidence in an espionage scandal. Under the law, the agency should remain politically neutral.
The main opposition party also claimed that Lee was unfit to lead the NIS as he has been critical of the NPAD’s demands to reform the agency.
In a contribution article published by newspaper the DongA Ilbo, Lee denounced the Democratic Party, which reformed as the NPAD, saying that the proposal was like “burning the whole house just to get rid of the bedbug.”
The opposition party was seeking to attack him during the hearing session but it appears to have not found evidence of strong enough wrongdoing to make his appointment untenable.
NPAD lawmakers were expected to question him about allegations that his two sons avoided paying national health insurance premiums but no critical issue that could strike a blow to Lee himself.
A NPAD official was quoted by Yonhap Agency that he had stayed away from the NIS for a long time, and that the party has no information about him as he worked in international affairs for a considerable time. Lee, after graduating the Military Academy, served in various posts including the director at the department of international affairs and the deputy chief of the NIS. He also worked as South Korean ambassador to Malaysia.
The ruling Saenuri Party, for its part, was expected to question his ability to deal with escalating fear of cyberterrorism involving North Korea. But it said that the opposition party should stop politicizing the hearing session and concentrate on testing his ethical standards and abilities.
The NPAD has been boycotting another parliamentary confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court justice nominee.
Park Sang-ok, a former prosecutor, was nominated as Supreme Court judge in January, but a group of NPAD lawmakers have been refusing to attend a hearing session for him, due to his role in the 1987 investigation of police officers accused of torturing a student activist to death.
The prosecution came under fire after a revelation by Catholic priests that there were more police officers involved in the torture than those it had indicted. The NPAD has claimed that the justice nominee was responsible for the cover-up and urged him to voluntarily withdraw from nomination.
By Cho Chung-un (christory@heraldcorp.com)
