Rulings of Era Epitomize Social Changes
By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
A top court's verdict allowing a female-turned-male transgender to legally change sex opened a new world for these people, an epoch-making ruling acknowledging that mental and social factors should also be considered in deciding a person's gender.
This and 13 other rulings that have brought radical changes in Korean society were picked as candidates for ``rulings of the era'' by the Supreme Court.
As time goes by, the top court has adopted new standards in making rulings to better guarantee gender equality, consumer rights and the human rights of criminal suspects.
Among the candidates, the court will pick ``12 rulings of the era.'' It plans to display details of the rulings in a court exhibition in its building in southern Seoul on Sept. 26. The display is designed to show the 60 years of the nation's judiciary.
Two of the candidates are about gender equality. In a 1988 ruling, the court annulled the telecom authorities' decision to apply a discriminatory retirement age limit on telephone operators, all of whom were female. The public firm set their age at 43, while that for other workers was 55, and the court decided that setting different limits without proper reason was against gender equality.
In another ruling in 2005 against male-centered family system, the court acknowledged that women had the same rights as men in sharing the wealth of their paternal families after marriage. Women of a family filed the suit after being discriminated against in wealth sharing. In the ruling, the court said, ``Recognizing only male adults as members of a family clan and excluding females from it constitutes a breach of the Constitution that guarantees individuals' dignity and gender equality.''
In 2006, the court allowed a female-turned-male transgender to change sex on the family registry, saying that gender should be decided by not only physical appearance but also mentality and social attitude to the person.
The court did not recognize testimony obtained without Miranda warnings as evidence in a ruling on a crime ring in 1992, as well as invalidated evidence secured in a raid conducted illegally during an investigation of Jeju Mayor Kim Tae-hwan's alleged Election Law violation.
In another meaningful verdict, it ruled that a ``successful coup d'etat can be punished.'' In 1997, it sentenced former President Chun Doo-hwan to life imprisonment and former President Roh Tae-woo, 17 years in prison, for forcibly suppressing a pro-democracy uprising in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 1980 after taking power through a military coup on Dec. 12, 1979.
Recent rulings dealt with cyber crimes. The court ruled that Soribada, peer-to-peer music file sharing service, violated copyright law, while also deciding that spreading false information on the Internet was defamation.