헌법재판소 미디어법 관련 권한쟁의심판사건 결정의 헌법적 문제점

On October 29th, 2009, the Korean Constitutional Court held that the passage process in Korean Congress on Media Acts was illegal and the Speaker infringed upon the power of the members of the Congress belonging to the opposition parties but the passage announcement of the Acts by the Speaker was not void. The Court admitted that there were illegal and void votings and revotings in the passage process of the Media Acts but ruled it would not invalidate the Acts in terms of respecting Congressional autonomy. This paper aims at dealing with the issue of Congressional autonomy in terms of the Constitutional law by analyzing the Korean Constitutional Court’s decisions that are concerned with the deficits in the legislative process and their effects on the validity of the passage announcement by the Speaker of the Act. To achieve this aim, this paper compares similar decisions by the Korean Constitutional Court that dealt with same issues including the Korean Constitutional Court’s decision on July 16th, 1997. After that, it analyzes and criticizes the decisions based on the Constitutional principles such as the functional separation of powers, the judicial activism and the procedural democracy.