생명 및 신체·정신의 안전권에 대한 연구

Safety is an abstract concept related to the human instinct for self-preservation, and is often understood in connection with the opposite word, ‘risk’. For this reason, safety has been categorized into external safety, internal safety, social safety, economic safety, and technical safety, depending on the cause of the risk, and over time, the concept of safety has become broader. The state’s efforts to secure safety have also changed significantly with the advent of a risk society. The discussion on whether to recognize safety as a right has been actively developed, and the affirmative view has argued that the right to safety can be derived through the subjectification of state obligations or can be recognized in accordance with the people’s demand for safety. On the other hand, those who deny the concept of the right to safety argue that the creation and guarantee of safety are among the state’s main responsibilities, but the concept of safety as a fundamental right cannot be established. They also counter that if the right to safety is recognized, individual freedoms would be protected by reflecting social safety, thus undermining subjective and individual rights, and causing side effects of subordinating the right to freedom to the right to safety. Considering these existing discussions, it seems more reasonable to shape the right to safety into a specific right by adding other rights closely related to safety, based on the already recognized fundamental rights to life and physical and mental integrity, rather than deriving the right to safety as an independent and comprehensive right. In this case, the right to safety of life, physical and mental integrity can be understood as the “the complete constitutional right”, which is a combination of defensive rights, protective rights, rights to organization and procedure, and social rights for the safety of the individual.