범죄피해자 식별정보 보도금지의 헌법적 쟁점에 대한 비교법적 연구 - 대한민국과 미국의 판례 비교를 중심으로 -

In recent ages, South Korea has developed an eccentric form of regulation on press freedom, which prohibits and punishes media coverage on personally identifiable information(PII) of crime victims. This kind of media regulation is widely legislated in many fields of law over a significantly long time in South Korea. In spite of their historical and extensive nature, these regulations have not received sufficient attention from South Korean jurists. However, they are becoming an issue in the wake of the Constitutional Court of Korea’s recent decision(2021Hun-Ka4) on October 27, 2022, which concluded that prohibiting and punishing media coverage of child abuse offender’s personally identifiable information is constitutional as protection of its victim. To build a theoretical framework for those media regulations, this article analyzed status and origins of them in South Korea, and also made a comparative law approach to similar legislations in the United States. These efforts include a closer look at the legal history of how Article 8 of the ‘Act On Special Cases Concerning The Punishment Of Specific Violent Crimes’ was legislated, as its legislation process entailed a thorough discussion among South Korean legislators about whether it is constitutionally justifiable in relation to press freedom. Also, this article attempted to compare some case laws from the United States, such as State v. Globe Communications Corp., decided by the Supreme Court of Florida in 1994, and Florida Star v. B.J.F., decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1989, to cover constitutional law issues along with some of the United States state laws similar to South Korean media regulations that punish media coverage of victim’s PII. In light of the above approaches to South Korean legal history and comparative law with the United States, this article concludes that these media regulations not only protect personal interests such as privacy, but also protect social and state interests such as resolving underreporting issues in certain areas of crime. In other words, it should be noted that media regulations punishing media coverage of victim’s PII in some areas of crime, which do not entail issues of underreporting, cannot be easily justified. Therefore, such media regulations should not be treated uniformly, regardless of the area of crime to which they apply. It is necessary to consider the specific nature of individual crime areas where media coverage of a victim’s PII is prohibited, such as the characteristics of the crime itself or the personal attributes of potential victims.