일본의 성년후견제도와 우리나라의 성년후견법안의 비교

Our country’s social problem of low birth rate and aging is at a severe level. Currently, the legal system to actively deal with the problem of low birth rate and aging through Korean civil laws is extremely inadequate. In particular, as we become an aged society, the civil laws which is applied when the mental judgement is deteriorated, has many problems. Under the current civil laws, incompetence and quasi-incompetence system can be used in case of deterioration of mental judgement. In the cases of incompetence and quasi-incompetence system, the system itself is rigid since it can only provide two types by law despite the fact that there are various degrees of mental judgement and protection needs based on each individual. And it is pronounced as incompetence and quasi-incompetence, it will be recorded in the census registration and hence there are hardly anyone who use this system. In addition, there are resistance and social prejudice against the words such as incompetence and quasi-incompetence. Hence, the system is practically not being used and is ending up as a mere scrap paper. The same situation is applicable to Japan. Hence, in order to actively deal with these problems, Japan enforced the new adult guardianship laws on 1 April, 2000. There has been discussions of introducing the adult guardianship laws but this ended up as just discussions, being excluded from the civil laws that was proposed in the National Assembly on 21 October 2004. And the adult guardianship laws was later proposed on 28 August 2006. Hence, this paper researches what should be considered in our laws by making comparative study of the Korean and Japanese adult guardianship laws.