국제인권법상 개인통보제도: 시민적 및 정치적 권리에 관한 규약을 중심으로

Under international human rights law, individual communication is a system that allows individual victims of rights violations to complain before the human rights treaty body directly. However, not every person in a State party to the Covenant can use the individual communications. It is because individual communication is a procedure that States Parties can optionally accept. In other words, individual communications to the State Party may be made if a prior agreement has been made separately. Nevertheless, the fact that an individual can directly file a complaint to a treaty body for violating his or her rights has a special meaning, different from other implementation systems. It is because the protection of individual fundamental human rights is widely recognized under international law today, but the remedies are still limited. In the traditional international legal order, where the state was the only subject under international law, the individual was not treated as the subject of state responsibility. However, with the development of international human rights law, almost all international human rights treaties have provided this system. And this paper examines in detail the way in which individual communications under international human rights law are operated and what their characteristics are, focusing on the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR.