INTRODUCTION
Modern constitutionalism posits the political doctrine that political power should be authorized and bound by a constitution enacted according to the will of the people and that people’s fundamental liberties and rights enshrined in the constitution should be protected (Lane 1996, p.17).
This doctrine has become ideologically dominant in most Western countries since the 18 th century. In 1948, when a three-year long period of American military rule came to an end, Koreans, who had never experienced Western-style civil revoÂlution throughout their history, had the opportunity to establish a republican form of government adopting the principal tenets of constitutionalism.[316] Since then, at least on the surface, Korea has been a constitutionalist state as it has maintained a written constitution confirming popular sovereignty and unalienÂable human rights. However, one would be hard pressed to make a convincing argument that the reality of Korea has matched this superficial appearance. The history of modern Korea has shown that the core components of constitutionalÂism, namely the protection of human rights, popular sovereignty, and the sepaÂration of powers, have never been properly put into practice. The provisions of the Korean constitutions since the First Republic (1948-1960) were merely â€?nominal’ as they were continuously ignored by authoritarian regimes. However, the Korean people’s consistent struggle for democracy encountered a watershed in the June 1987 Uprising, leading to the ninth revision of the Korean Constitution. Under this new constitution, Korean people are accelerating constitutional democracy not only in principle but also in practice. The most remarkable achievement in this process of democratization has been the estabÂlishment of a new Constitutional Court and its success in bolstering the protecÂtion of human rights in Korea.This chapter aims to explain in what ways the new constitutional adjudicaÂtion system is successfully built into Korean constitutional arrangements and to demonstrate how the Korean system of constitutional adjudication works.
II.
Source:
Cho Kuk. Litigation in Korea. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited,2010. — 257 p.. 2010