SOUTH KOREA. ASSEMBLY BEGINS DELIBERATION ON DEATH PENALTY FOR FIRST TIME

South Korea’s National Assembly commenced its first ever deliberation on a bill to abolish the controversial death penalty. The Assembly's Legislation and Judiciary Committee opened its general meeting and started discussing the bill to ban capital punishment submitted by Uri lawmaker Yoo Ihn-tae and signed by a total of 175 lawmakers. The proposed bill would scrap the death penalty and replace it with a punishment of life imprisonment, with no parole or pardon possible. 
But Justice Minister Kim Seung-kyu expressed concern over the spreading move to ban capital punishment and said the penalty should be maintained for now.
"(The death penalty is needed) in cases of terrorist attacks where one criminal may claim many lives," Kim said.
It was the first time for the Assembly's legislation committee to officially deliberate the bill on banning the death penalty after repeated attempts failed in the past. A similar bill was presented to the National Assembly in 1999, and again in 2001, but both attempts were thwarted by the judiciary committee and the bills never made it to a vote.
Of the 15-member judiciary committee, there are eight Uri members, five GNP members and one from the Democratic Labor Party.
Most of the eight Uri lawmakers including Choi Yong-gyu, Jung Seong-ho, Lee In-young and Woo Yoon-keun support the ban of the death penalty, while most of the five GNP lawmakers such as Joo Sung-young and Kim Seong-jo contend the punishment should be kept intact. DLP's Roh Hoe-chan agrees to veto the capital punishment.
Any bill deliberated and passed at the judiciary committee is passed on to the Assembly's plenary session for a final vote.
"The death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment that violates the fairness, appropriateness, not to mention the balance of the benefit and protection of the law," Rep. Yoo Ihn-tae said.
"For a state authority to forfeit a human being's life contradicts the virtue of the Constitution."
Rep. Yoo, once on death row himself for violating martial law under a military government in the 1970s, was backed by a large group of lawyers and a coalition of religious leaders against capital punishment.