Research of criminal laws of major countries, such as Criminal Act, Criminal
Procedure Act, and Criminal Administration Act, has been either merely
concentrated on translating provisions and regulations, or highlighted only
socially controversial issues to provide legislation guideline from a rather narrow
perspective. However, enacting and amending law, and establishing and reforming
field practices and system require the introduction and comparative analysis of
issue-specific laws, theories, and court cases of foreign countries in a
comprehensive and structured manner so that the research result could properly
be integrated into our criminal system. Considering such need, the purposes of
this study are as follows.

First, it aims to discover general theory of criminal law from a dogmatic
perspective. In other words, we explore whether it is possible at all to find and
set a “global standard,” and elicit relevant implications and conclusion for each
issue. Next, the study also intends to compare and analyze effective laws and
regulations as well as court cases and related systems as tools for reforming
corresponding or similar systems and legal practices in the ROK. In addition,
it plans to propose an international standard and procedure useful in a
cross-border criminal justice collaboration, and provide norms and basic
direction that can be used as reference in a search for criminals and investigation
of crimes. Lastly, based on the primary outcome of this study, we further hope
to establish a structured and multi-perspective foreign criminal law information
system in the future.

This study looks at five countries – UK, US, France, Germany, and Japan –
for analytical comparison of General and Individual Provisions of Criminal Act,
Criminal Procedure Act, and regulation regarding international criminal justice
collaboration. Under an objective of building a system for comparative criminal
law research, issue-specific approach will be taken in translating relevant laws
and regulations, comparing and analyzing the main contents, and introducing
related institution and court cases. At the core of all these efforts lies harmonizing
framework and structure that enables comparison among different countries. That
is, the contents will be written based on a common structure and terms agreed
upon through discussions of researchers. The outcome of our research will be
once again organized in a form of database for more systematic presentation.
This year, following our work last year, we focused on inchoate crimes and
participation (principal/aider and abettor, etc.) among General Provisions, and
then briefly introduced concurrent crimes and their punishment in different
countries. Since how concurrent crimes are dealt with and punished in each
country is broad and ample enough to be explored through another independent
study, we just provide an overview this year. Among Individual Provisions, we
selected crimes designed to protect personal legal interest, and in particular
homicide, bodily injury and assault, larceny and fraud, and sexual assault to be
compared among the five countries.

To this end, first, we put the most emphasis on unifying the structure of the
five countries for each issue as a starting point for comparative analysis. Without
it, our research would do nothing more than merely introducing various criminal
acts. Admittedly, the structure was not completely uniform among the countries:
sometimes an isolated and outlying headline appeared. Nevertheless, the
researchers came up with an mutually acceptable through multiple rounds of
discussion and debates. Second, overall, the criminal law provisions, theories and
court cases of each country are agreeably corresponding to the provisions and
discussions of the ROK, and have been made known through previous research
activities, making it relatively easy to translate and organize them. Despite such
ease, the legal discourse in the US and UK has barely been properly introduced
to our academic scene, thereby making it urgent to unify terms between the
two countries. We used the same translation for the same or mostly similar
corresponding concepts but when it was impossible to do, we translated the terms
differently. Meanwhile, most major concepts are commonly found in both
common law an continental law systems, and were introduced as the same despite
some subtle differences in meaning. However, when we could not match them,
we provided a separate translation. As a disclaimer, all the terms presented in
this study are of provisional nature and subject to change through further study.
Individual Provisions, in particular, understandably have crimes unique to each
country, and thus require continuous research going forward. Third, each chapter
has a separate conclusion based on our findings. Under the common structure
for inchoate crimes, participation, homicide, larceny and fraud, and sexual
assault, similarities and differences among five countries were compared and
analyzed to elicit implications for the ROK.