난민심사절차에서의 채증 및 심리에 대한 개관 및 한국에의 시사점 -신빙성 개념을 중심으로

The Refugee Status Determination (RSD) Process is a process of determining whether a person coming from another State is in danger of being persecuted in that State, often without any material evidence whatsoever. The peculiarities of RSD mean that a systematic method of evaluating the credibility of the testimony of the asylum-seeker, as well as the ability to examine each case from a future-oriented perspective, is needed. The leading States in this field have in fact are trying to stop the credibility assessment from becoming simply an intuitive process based on the overall impression of the asylum-seeker, thoroughly examining the logic behind the acceptance or denial of credibility. Korea has tried its best to apply jurisprudence established in the leading nations to its own RSD process, but cannot escape the criticism that it in fact has relied on the overall impression of the asylum-seeker when judging whether he or she actually is a refugee. In particular, the Korean court’s stance toward credibility assessment, emphasizing external factors irrelevant to the facts of the case itself, such as the time of application or the mixture of economic motives, has the danger of corrupting the overall RSD process. This paper aims to address the key issue of credibility assessment by looking into the jurisprudence that has developed in other countries in regards to preventing the process from becoming a mere assessment of impression and evaluate the practice of Korean courts on the premise that most of the jurisprudence mentioned above are actually standards to evaluate whether Korea is actually fulfilling the duty to protect human rights.