The recent surge of the interest in crime victims and criminal mediation system has cast new attention on the informal criminal agreement. but Korea's criminal proceedings has already adopted criminal agreement in an informal way.

Criminal agreement refers to the situation when the victim agrees to terminate the criminal proceedings through the reconciliation with the offender under the premise for damages.
The discretion of the judge in sentencing for the favor of the offender has been already recognize in practice in the criminal proceedings in korea.

However, the criminal agreement does not have applicable provisions in the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code. It is strictly an informal institution solely contingent on the will of concerning parties.

Prosecutors or judges can impose certain legal preions in compliance with the relevant provisions in the criminal proceedings.

Thus, the criminal agreement system does not have the foundation to meet the proper request for criminal policies, because there is no legal provision.

In addition, since there is no mandatory provisions regarding the criminal agreement, and that is relying solely on the concernings parties’ agreement, the victim may not be able to obtain the proper preions in a private dispute resolution precess.

Furthermore, due to the risk resulting from appeasement and other forms of intimidation or deception by the accused(defendant) in the agreement process, the criminal agreement system is likely to be distorted.

The present study suggests that the criminal agreement system which has been informally acknowledged needs to be established in a formal institutionalized way in order to solve this problem by incorporating the provisions into the current system of the criminal code and criminal procedure code.