Korean divorce law is complicated enough as it is, but this case sitting before a family court in Seoul might makes things even more complex. A woman is seeking a divorce from her husband so she can remarry - a common enough situation - but in this case, the woman in question is a defector from the North who left her husband behind in the Workers’ Paradise. Now, in the Land of the Choco-Pies, she has met a new man whom she would like to marry, and would like the court to grant her a divorce. This is easier said than done. North Koreans, like South Koreans, maintain a family register in which marriages are recorded, and according to the South Korean laws regarding defectors, these registers are valid in the South. Moreover, South Korean divorce laws forbids divorces initiated by one party without sufficient grounds, and I guess in a Confucian nation like South Korea, “separated by the DMZ” does not constitute sufficient grounds for divorce. Apparently, up till now, defectors in similar circumstances simply cohabited or entered into sashil-hon - roughly translated as “reality marriages” and being unfamiliar with Korean family law I’d assume those are similar to common-law marriages but less legally binding, because according to the article, this has led to problems with child support and inheritances.
Now, the court may rule that marriages concluded in the North are not legally binding in the South, but to do so carries with it its own problems, namely, it makes meaningless the family registries reissued to defectors by the South Korean government, in which are recorded marriages that took place in the North.
I’d love to get some feedback on this by those readers and bloggers with a better knowledge of Korean family law - perhaps they can add more to this discussion than I can. However, the judge presiding over the case, while predicting that this particular suit will be concluded by January of next year, cautioned that new legislation needs to be made in order to deal with this problem in the post-unification period.
2 Comments
I’ve referred your post to a legal forum run by an expat lawyer working on the South Korean Constitutional Court. Anyone can track responses here:
http://hayeslaw.org/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/index.php
Nice site you’re recommended, Mr. Infidel.
Sasilhon is sometimes called “common-law marriage.” Or at least it’s the other way around… “common-law marriage” in an American context is often translated into Korean as sasilhon.
My advisor at Yonsei had someone on his dissertation committee decades ago who got separated from his family during the war. He looked for them for then years, then married again. The question here would be what basis he had for marrying again without divorcing, ’cause I myself don’t know. Anyway, so now he’s got a new wife and a kid or two, when a child from the first wife recognizes him on the street. Oooops. Appears they’d all been down South the whole time. It was a generation where wives never felt they had to have much loves for their husbands anyway, so they all agreed each wife wouldn’t try to prosecute the other for adultry (a whole nother legal question, as you may know) and live in separate houses, with him going back and forth between them. Anyway, he died relatively young, and at the time people said it was because he lectured too much as he struggled to feed them all.
Another interesting fact comes from when KBS did a massive live telathon to re-unite family members. I wasn’t here but I think it might have been as late as the late sixties or early seventies. People would get a few seconds on television during which they’d give some clues like “Remember sister, remember the little hut by the wood next to the chickens?” and the woman he’d only known as “nuna” could then contact him later. Anyway, of all the types of relationships - parent-child, sibling, it was spousal relationships that saw the lowest reunion rate…. looks like a lot of people used the war as a perfect opprotunity to trade in for new partners.