South Korea’s state-run anticorruption watchdog is expanding its online petition to offer easier access to Koreans living overseas, from July, officials siad Thursday. It will also be offering the service in more foreign languages.

The Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission said it has started operating the online petition e-People service via Korean.net as well as its own website (www.epeople.go.kr).

The e-People site’s original Korean name was “Sinmungo” (Big Drum), which comes from a system during Joseon Dynasty in which a person that had complaints could inform authorities by striking a drum. 

Similar to this ancient practice, the service allows Koreans -- both here and abroad -- along with foreigners living in Korea to file petitions, report corruption as well as discuss and propose policies.

Overseas Koreans are allowed to visit Korean.net -- operated by the Overseas Koreans Foundation -- and file petitions either in Korean or English. ACRC officials said that they had decided to start a petition service on the website because it is frequently accessed by Koreans living outside the country.

The ACRC said it will gradually expand the services to provide them in 13 languages, just like the official e-People homepage.

Translation for petitions submitted via e-People and the ACRC’s responses are carried out by commission under the OKF and done by a designated private firm. The ACRC funds this process.

E-People currently offers services in Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Indonesian, Thai, Uzbek, Bengali, Cambodian and Sri Lanka’s official language, Sinhalese.

The ACRC started to allow foreign-language submissions of petitions in 2008, as part of its project to support and protect Koreans living outside the country.

“Petitions submitted via both websites will be dealt with in an identical process, which means we can expect that (the new services) will help address complaints of overseas Koreans,” said an ACRC official.
 

Another part of the commission’s plan is to expand the foreign language services for the e-People website itself. Officials said that it plans to launch petition services in Russian and Burmese -- the official language of Myanmar -- on July 1.

The launch will coincide with the three-month promotion period of the services from July to September, during which introductory leaflets will be distributed to 218 government organizations including foreign embassies in Korea and multicultural family support centers. The leaflet will contain information on how to file petitions in foreign languages.

“We decided to focus our promotion in the autumn period, because that is generally when various events for foreigners and multicultural families are held here,” explained Kim Yeong-hee, an official in the e-People team of the ACRC.

The ACRC has obtained a domestic patent for its “Global e-Petition System,” which receives petitions in different languages, processes them and notifies the petitioner of the results in his or her own language.

Last year, 1,370 petitions were filed via e-People. Most of them were about overdue wages, unlawful layoffs and visa-related issues. Petitions from foreigners who work in the education sector also made up a considerable proportion, officials said.

By Yoon Min-sik (minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)