Legislative and Administrative Responses to COVID-19 Virus in the Republic of Korea

Abstract

South Korea had learned a valuable lesson from the Middle East Respiratory Syndromes (hereinafter “MERS”) outbreak in 2015. Learning form the MERS outbreak, South Korea has been successfully fighting COVID-19 to a standstill, without being in lockdown and seriously infringing civil liberties. In this regard, emergent legislative and administrative responses to the pandemic of OVID-19 are essential to fight against the infectious diseases. This paper explores how South Korea can make expeditious legislation and administrative measures to combat COVID-19 virus and effectively respond to the virus outbreak. Emergent legislative and administrative responses to the pandemic of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 are necessary for a nation to effectively prevent and control them. During the pandemic of the next infectious diseases, emergent legislative and administrative countermeasures need to be carried out against shortage of medical or non-medical products such as test kits, facial masks, cotton swabs for diagnostic tests, hand sanitizers, etc. and sudden rise of their price. In this regard, the South Korean legal system can be one of the good models to effectively deal with the pandemic of infectious diseases. Especially, contact tracing system in South Korea draws attention from foreign media and legal communities. When we take into account the pandemic of deadly COVID-19 virus, right to life, right of occupation and right to know information on the movement paths of the infected patients which non-infected persons have should take precedence over the right to move and the freedom of privacy, of the infected persons and their contacts. In this regard, even though the KCDC provided with and distributed to local governments the guidelines for disclosure of information on the movement paths of the infected patients on March 14, 2020, the guidelines are not binding upon local governments. Nonetheless, non-binding effect of the guidelines does not affect the constitutionality of the relevant provisions which allow contact retracing under the IDPC Act of 2020.