Basic principles of national order in modern constitution are democracy and constitutionalism. One of the problems relating to the need of legal security according to the principles of constitutionalism is retroactive legislation prohibition. Accordi...
Basic principles of national order in modern constitution are democracy and constitutionalism. One of the problems relating to the need of legal security according to the principles of constitutionalism is retroactive legislation prohibition. According to the needs of legal security, the law has to be already effective when an action in problem appears, and the law enacted after the action shall not be retroactively applied for it. If retroactive law is accepted, an action which is legal at the time when there is no law against the action may be illegal after the enactment of a new law, which may cause serious insecurity in entire legal system as well as insecurity in legal status of individuals.
In this perspective, Korean constitution regulates in Section 2, Article 13: " Every people shall not be restricted of his or her right to vote or derived from the right of property by retroactive legislation." The Principle of Legality regulated in Section 2, Article 12 and Section 1, Article 13 prohibits criminal punishment by the retroactive legislation.
However, retroactive legislation is not absolutely prohibited. There are some cases that constitutionally put more value on retroactive legislature, and for the action which lasts for a considerable period, when the law when the action begins and the law during the action are different, public good which should be achieved through legislation may have more weight rather than protection of reliability of the past condition in respect to application of a new law.
Korean Supreme Court and The Constitutional Court which are influenced by the German Federal Constitutional Court classify the retroactive law into true and untrue. The true retroactive law means legislation which may be changed through enactment or revision of the law for the case which is already closed or completed in respect to the past facts or law. The true retroactive legislation shall be prohibited and the untrue retroactive law regulates facts or legal things which began in the last, but is not yet completed through enactment or revision of laws. It believes that a new law may be retroactively applied through comparing goods of reliability protection and public good. However, specifically, the true retroactive legislation is more strictly restricted because the need of reliability protection and legal security may be more seriously infringed when an action is illegally considered by the law which is later enacted though it is not illegal at the time when it is taken.
There is a controversy on concepts of retroactive law in respect to a problem how far retroactive law is allowed within the range that the principle of retroactive law prohibition is not affected. That is, there is a suggestion that if the untrue retroactive legislature is basically allowed, it should be totally excluded from the retroactive legislation concept. Some suggest that it is related to reliability protection that happens in the process that a transfer happens from established legal condition to a new legal condition. Which concept is to be taken, as results are not remarkably different, this study is to follow the concept of the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court.
In respect to the true retroactive legislature, there were many controversies on unconstitutionality of May 18 Special Law in its permitted limit. For the untrue retroactive legislation, there were many controversies on administrative law such as tax. Finally, the problem on in what case the retroactive legislation is allowed should be carefully considered through comparison between public good and reliability protection according to the principle of constitutionality. In the future, we need more intensive research on reasonable standards of the retroactive legislation.