Prosecutors Reject Record Share of Police Arrest Warrant Requests

South Korean prosecutors rejected more than one-third of arrest warrant requests submitted by police during the first eight months of 2026, marking the highest rejection rate recorded in the available annual data.

Figures from the Public Prosecution Service showed that police submitted 26,961 requests for arrest warrants between January and August. Prosecutors declined to seek 9,186 of those warrants, producing a rejection rate of 34.1 percent. It was the first time the figure had risen above 30 percent.

The rate has climbed steadily in recent years. It stood at 22.8 percent in 2021 and reached 26.8 percent in 2025 before accelerating further this year. The increase means a substantially larger share of police requests did not advance to the stage of judicial review for issuance of an arrest warrant.

Police investigators have complained that prosecutors became more reluctant to pursue warrants requested by police while South Korea prepared a major restructuring of its prosecution system. The institutional overhaul stripped prosecutors of investigative powers and separated the functions of criminal investigation and indictment.

South Korea abolished its prosecution office on Friday after 78 years and launched two new agencies under the revised structure. The reform followed long-running criticism that prosecutors had accumulated excessive authority by combining investigative and charging powers. The latest warrant figures offer a concrete measure of the friction that developed between police investigators and prosecutors during the transition.

A similar pattern appeared in requests to search property or seize evidence. Prosecutors rejected 19.1 percent of police requests for search and seizure warrants during the January-to-August period. That was sharply above the annual range of 10.7 percent to 13.7 percent recorded from 2021 through 2025.

Arrest, search and seizure warrants require judicial approval, but police requests first pass through prosecutors, who decide whether to ask a court to issue them. A prosecutorial rejection therefore prevents the request from reaching a judge in its submitted form.

The rising rejection rates are likely to intensify scrutiny of how the newly divided criminal justice institutions coordinate cases. The figures do not by themselves establish why individual requests were turned down, but they show that disagreements over police warrant applications became markedly more frequent before the new system began operating.