공공기관의 정보공개에 관한 판례분석 - 공개·비공개사유를 중심으로 -

For the democratization of administration and the protection of people’s legal interests, the access right for the information kept and managed by public institution must be guaranteed above all. According to the predominant opinion, the right to request information disclosure comes from the people’s rights to know, guaranteed by the constitution. In Korea, Official Information Disclosure Act was established in 1996 and was enforced since 1998. On the other hand, this necessity to disclose information may collide with other rights such as privacy protection or fair performance of duties. Therefore, in order to decide what to disclose, we need to balance between the need to disclose information- such as people’s right to know, the transparency of the operation of state affairs - and the need to keep secret - such as the privacy protection and the fair performance of duties. When balancing, “Any information kept and managed by public institutions shall be disclosed to the public in an active manner pursuant to this Act to ensure people's right to know”(Article 3 of the Official Information Disclosure Act) must be considered. Article 9 (1) states that: “All information kept and managed by public institutions shall be subject to disclosure to the public”, but some information from Article 9 (1) 1-8 can be non-disclosure. However, Article 9 uses the vague expressions like: “Information which is deemed likely to seriously undermine national interests”, “Information which is likely to seriously obstruct the protection of people's lives, physical safety and properties”, “Information which has considerable grounds for remarkably obstructing the fair performance of duties or research and development”, so there are difficulties in interpreting and applying those clauses. Due to this, there were many cancellations of High Court’s judgements regarding the Official Information Disclosure Act by the Supreme Court.