Despite more than a decade of repeated recommendations by international human rights bodies to enact comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation, South Korea has not done so. This raises fundamental questions about the conditions under which international human rights mechanisms can affect domestic human rights legislation. This chapter argues that despite the apparent lack of legislative change, Korea’s movement for antidiscrimination legislation successfully brought the international human rights norms of equality and nondiscrimination into Korean society. South Korea has long been regarded as a homogeneous society in which assimilationist forces dominate policymaking and culture. Strong opposition to comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation from conservative Protestant groups paradoxically exposed Korean society’s prevalent but hidden intolerance of diversity, energizing the antidiscrimination movement and increasing the visibility of minorities. This process of “discovering” diversity has catalyzed significant changes in social norms and values, which constitute a critical step toward enacting comprehensive antidiscrimination legislation that embraces all forms of diversity.

This chapter examines human rights policies and their relationship to conceptions of the national interest, focusing on the 2001 establishment and subsequent functioning of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK). The chapter argues that one reason why Korea created and consolidated the NHRCK was to realize its desired identity as a seonjinguk (advanced country). Over time, with changes in political administrations, the definition of a seonjinguk transformed alongside human rights discourses, with implications for the NHRCK’s functioning as a channel for rights-claiming. By tracing the rise and subsequent weakening of the NHRCK from 2001 to 2012, this chapter demonstrates that national interest considerations shape state decisions about whether to comply with or disregard global human rights norms embodied in national human rights institutions like the NHRCK. It also illustrates the interplay between international and domestic human rights discourses.

This chapter investigates how South Korean citizens’ petitioning to redress grievances against the state and constitutional adjudication have developed since the end of the 1980s. While de jure there existed a constitutional review system since the founding of the Republic in 1948, it was only after transition to formal democracy that infringement on fundamental rights could be de facto appealed in the Constitutional Court, which was established in 1988. Through an analysis of caseload statistics from the Constitutional Court, the chapter explores how citizens have been making use of the constitutional appeal system for claiming their rights. The study also qualitatively examines shifts in the logic and outcomes of constitutional adjudication of fundamental rights claims concerning major social issues such as gender equality, sexual autonomy, and freedom of conscience.

The definition of labor rights for Korean workers has changed since the 1980s along with the neoliberal transformation of the economy. While workers demanded humane treatment and the right to form autonomous labor unions in the earlier period, labor rights in present day Korea are anchored on workers’ status recognition and the right to secure employment. Also, the methods through which workers press for their rights have shifted from union-based collective action to symbolic and extreme forms of protest. This chapter examines the changing notion of labor rights by investigating how structural conditions in the labor market generate workers’ primary grievances, how these grievances enlighten workers’ rights consciousness, and how workers’ interactions with employers and state institutions, including via labor laws, shaped the core claims of labor rights in the 1980s and the 2000s, respectively. It also compares the forms of collective action that workers take to assert their rights in these two periods.

The legal incompetence of wives (cheo-ui muneungnyeok) and its inhibitions on women’s legal rights in Korea during the Japanese colonial rule (1910–45) were emphasized during the postcolonial period. As a result, the actual legal activities of women during the colonial period have been overlooked. This chapter examines women’s lawsuits at the High Court of Colonial Korea (Chōsen kōtō hōin) over separate property rights during the colonial period. I show that women actively struggled in the colonial legal system to have their rights over separate property acknowledged against their opponents’ claims that Korean custom categorically denied property rights to women. Surprisingly, women won many of these cases. I argue that the colonial household registration system, where the rights of household heads over family property were strengthened, inadvertently resulted in the protection of separate property rights, many of which were held by women.

This chapter recapitulates the book’s main theoretical and empirical findings. By unpacking the interaction between rights on the books and rights in practice, we can gain a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the evolving meanings of rights and claims-making options in Korea. We find that although the types of rights claims are diversifying and opportunities and resources for rights claiming have improved, obtaining rights protection and catalyzing social change remains challenging. We then generalize our findings on rights-based mobilization in Korea and beyond, categorizing them into lessons on (1) understanding rights in action, (2) rights as plural and fluid in meaning, and (3) rights hierarchies privileging certain groups over others. We conclude with thoughts on the future and challenges of rights claiming in Korea.

Based on a neo-Confucian vision that the monarch’s mandate relied on listening to his people’s grievances, the Joseon state (1392–1910) empowered subjects regardless of gender or status to petition the sovereign regarding grievances not rectified in lower courts. While Joseon-era women are usually considered to have been silent subjects outside the home, their petitioning activity shows that women, irrespective of their status, had the same legal rights as men to appeal grievances to the state. This chapter parses women’s linguistic practices in claims-making to show how their petitioning rights complicated gender dynamics of Confucian society. The gender hierarchy was reinforced through women’s narrative strategy as they appropriated discourses of domesticity. At the same time, I posit that women as legal agents were re-gendering legal identity by constructing a sense of personhood via their petitioning. Through gendered claims, women struggled to defend not only themselves and their sense of morality but also their entire family.

Government policies and South Korea’s legal system historically regarded people with disabilities as objects of compassion and protection, rather than human beings equal to nondisabled people. Starting in the 1980s, disabled people began protesting for equal worth and dignity. People with disabilities then established organizations and sought changes in policies and the legal system with support from civic groups and the media. Their claims, mostly grounded upon natural law ideas and the equality protections in the Constitution, were for formal equality. The chapter traces the struggles by Korean disability communities, civic organizations, and lawyers to raise public consciousness and press the National Assembly to revise or enact laws, such as the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). The chapter also examines the outcomes of movements for the rights to mobility, independent living, and special education. It concludes by highlighting shortcomings in Korean disability law and suggests necessary reforms for a more inclusive and integrated society.

The chapter opens with a discussion of what we mean by “rights” in the context of Korea. At its core, this book is about people who seek ways to express their grievances about perceived injustices. While “rights talk” has a rich pedigree in Western scholarship and “human rights” has gained international currency, we use the term “rights” loosely to encompass varied conceptions and subsets (e.g., constitutional rights; human rights; civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights; citizens’ rights; women’s rights, minority rights), and to give contributors space to define rights in the context of their disciplines and the groups they study. Next, we situate this volume within existing literature on Korea related to democratization, social movements, the judicialization of politics, constitutionalism, and human rights. This volume asks: How have groups used rights language to frame and legitimate their demands in South Korea; in what ways have rights-claiming processes and tactics differed over time and across issues; and what remains fundamentally challenging for groups asserting their rights?

This chapter examines how the growth of multiple visa categories created to accommodate labor shortages within South Korea’s restrictive immigration regime has led to the development of noncitizen rights hierarchies. I focus on three visa categories that represent the largest migrant groups in Korea: migrant workers, co-ethnic migrants, and so-called marriage migrants. Migrant claims to rights overlap with those made by citizens in their fundamental conceptions of human dignity and their appeals for state protections. But the scope of their claims has tended to be specific to their migrant subcategories or visa statuses: labor protections for migrant workers, equality among co-ethnic migrants, and state protections for marriage migrants. Even within the single national context of Korea, the struggle for rights by one migrant group does not necessarily make their claimed rights universal, or even accessible, to others.

This chapter explores what border-crossing tells us about the linkage between citizenship and rights-claiming by examining the experiences of North Koreans who resettle in South Korea, focusing on the security screening process that occurs immediately after they arrive on South Korean soil. Although North Koreans are often described as having “automatic citizenship” in the South under both constitutional and communitarian conceptions of citizenship, that claim is only partially accurate. I show that North Koreans must exhibit considerable agency to claim citizen-standing, and their rights are heavily circumscribed and contingent on state recognition of their identity throughout the screening process. The chapter elucidates how marginalized citizens claim rights at a site of maximal state power (Korea’s deep and securitized border) and illuminates how the gap between legal recognition of rights and their instantiation in state practice can render the claims process extended and arduous even for individuals whose citizen-standing is already theoretically established.