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| Baskut Tuncak, United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and waste, takes questions at a press conference to announce his preliminary observations about the impact of hazardous substances on factory workers in Korea. / Yonhap |
Labor ministry says individuals have responsibility to prove causation between health impacts and working sites
By Kim Yoo-chul
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The Ministry of Employment and Labor said Friday individuals have the responsibility to prove causation between any illnesses they suffer from and the hazardous products to which they have been exposed.
This is an official response to an end of visit statement by Baskut Tuncak, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes.
In a news conference held in The Plaza Hotel, downtown Seoul, Friday afternoon, the rapporteur said the government has an obligation to protect people from hazardous substances and waste.
The labor ministry focused on a part of UN findings that said, "The burden of proof placed by the government on victims is so great that only three former Samsung Electronics workers out of 67 claimants (4.5%) have been able to establish causation in order to gain some degree of compensation through the government's Occupational National Insurance for injuries suffered from hazardous working conditions."
Mentioning Article 37 of the Industrial Diseases Insurance Law in Korea, the labor ministry said that the UN official should have looked at related provisions.
"According to the law, an employee who wants to claim for occupational diseases, then that employee has the obligation to prove which working conditions have links to the issue," the ministry said in a statement.
"If an employee fails to present evidences backing causality between workplaces and their health condition, then that employee is unable to get government recognition for an occupational disease," said the labor ministry.
The ministry said such guideline is also similarly applied to Japan, Germany, the United States, Sweden and Canada.
It stressed the Constitutional Court of Korea also ruled on June 25 that Article 37 wasn't against the Constitution.
"The ministry will collaborate with Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Services to further raise an acceptance rate for industrial diseases and strengthen fairness of investigation in such alleged cases, helping workers lessen their burden to prove causation between health impacts and workplaces."
The government acceptance rate for occupational diseases especially those who are suffering or have suffered from cancer and leukemia was up to 48.9 percent between 2010 and 2012 with 266 cases out of 544 being approved for compensation.
This was an increase from an average approval rate of 13.1 percent between 2000 and 2009, according to the health ministry.
Tuncak said he was afraid that many workers at Samsung Electronics have fallen victim to priorities that place profits before human rights.
The UN official said the victims claim that they used or were otherwise exposed to hazardous substances every day, sometimes for 12 hours a day, with only 1 or 2 days off per month.
The UN official added; "Yet despite what appear to be massive information gaps, victims bear the burden of proving that their suffering is a result of hazardous substances in the workplace."
The statement was mostly written based on interviews.
The UN official said his main mission was to monitor and assess government steps to protect human rights implicated in the management of hazardous substances and waste throughout people's lives; however, out of his 70-minute presentation about the results, Tuncak spent more time talking about the ongoing Samsung case.
The UN official said he also met with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and various divisions of the Ministry of Environment.
An official at the foreign ministry didn't respond to The Korea Times' requests for comments on the findings.
