Input 2021.03.09 10:00
The Ministry of Justice announced on the 9th that in response to the rapid increase in the number of single-person households, it has launched a TF for’private family members’ since February to improve the existing legal system centered on multi-person households to discuss ways to improve the system. The private family is an abbreviation of’social coexistence, single-person family’. TF includes not only officials from the Ministry of Justice, but also architects, writers, professors of humanities, and documentary producers.
The reason that the Ministry of Justice has even created a TF is because the growth rate of single-person households in Korea is steep. The proportion of single-person households in Korea was 30.2% in 2019, which is already close to the OECD average (30.6% in 2015). It has been a long time since single-person households have become the main form of furniture, overtaking two-person households.
On the other hand, the domestic legal system still focuses on multi-person households, not single-person households. The Ministry of Justice plans to discover various legal system improvement tasks in line with the increase in single-person households through the private family TF, and reflect them in actual policies.
TF is largely debated around five key tasks: relative, inheritance, housing, protection, and ties. In the case of relatives, we mainly discuss ways to re-establish the concept of family in the civil law for the era of single-person households. In the field of inheritance, based on the recently legislated Goo Hara Act and the Infidelity Prevention Act, we are planning to find improvement measures that can better reflect the intentions of the heirs.
In the residential sector, discussions on how to ease the requirements for transfer and substituting leases to facilitate share houses, and to introduce an electronic management group assembly system so that single-person households can participate in decision-making on management and change of collective buildings. do. In the field of protection, we discuss ways to revitalize the voluntary guardianship system that can protect single-person households.
In the field of ties, we discuss ways to legally guarantee the concept of non-animalization of animals, which separates companion animals from ordinary objects. It plans to find ways to improve the legal status of animals, such as prohibiting the seizure of companion animals.