혼인관계가 이혼으로 해소된 이후에도 과거 일정기간 존재하였던 혼인관계의 무효 확인을 구할 확인의 이익이 있는지 여부

The gist of the subject case pertains to whether there is an interest in seeking confirmation of the nullity of a marriage relationship, which existed for a certain period of time in the past, even after the dissolution of the marriage by divorce. Supreme Court Decision 82Meu67 decided February 28, 1984 previously concluded as follows: “The reason for which the claimant, a woman, files a request for confirmation of the nullity of marriage, which is that the claimant has been disgraced by the record of divorce after marriage on the family register, does not affect the claimant’s current legal relationship, and the confirmation of the nullity of marriage that has been dissolved by the report of divorce is a confirmation of the legal relationship that existed in the past, and thus there is no interest in seeking confirmation of the nullity of marriage.” However, this has been consistently criticized by the academic community. Overruling the existing precedent, the subject case ruled that once a marriage has been already dissolved by divorce, the existing marriage relationship becomes a defunct legal relationship. Yet considering that a marriage relationship, which affects a person’s status in the relationship with other people, serves as a basis for several other legal relationships, an efficient and proper means to resolve disputes related to the marriage at issue would be to seek confirmation of the nullity of the marriage at issue per se, which is a legal relationship that was operative in the past, rather than to repeat the procedures for seeking confirmation of the effectiveness of such numerous legal relationships one by one, and thus the interest in seeking confirmation of the nullity of a marriage relationship can be admitted. The subject case cited the difference of legal effect between a nullified marriage and divorce, the commensurability in terms of the legal effect when compared to a lawsuit for confirmation of the nullity of an adoptive relationship after the dissolution of the adoptive relationship by agreement, for which the court admitted an interest in the confirmation of a past legal relationship, the necessity for securing the objective evidentiary materials for making a request for the correction of the family relations register in which a nullified marriage record is entered, and the need for the remedy of rights violations as the reason for admitting the interest in seeking confirmation. According to the existing precedent, in a case where a party who had filed a report of marriage without intention of marriage gets a divorce and files a lawsuit for confirmation of the nullity of marriage, the said party was not granted an opportunity for having his or her case heard on the merits on the ground of the lack of the interest in confirmation and was thus subject to the dismissal of his or her lawsuit; however, the subject case changed the existing precedent and affirmed the interest in confirmation with respect to a request for confirmation of the nullity of marriage after divorce as a means to deliver an exhaustive resolution to legal disputes for good, providing a measure for the correction of a family relations register where a record of a nullified marriage is erroneously entered, thereby allowing disputes related to the people’s legal lives to be substantively resolved, which in turn made it possible for those who have suffered disadvantages from family relations registers containing erroneous records of nullified marriages to be afforded the substantive protection of their rights.