우리나라 공용수용제도의 최근 쟁점과 개선방안

Abstract Although the "Land Expropriation Act" was enacted over 60 years ago in Korea, the legal system related to expropriation still presents various problems. While the public expropriation system is a crucial means of realizing the public interest, if the public necessity review is inadequate or due compensation is not provided, it can lead to serious property rights violations. Therefore, the requirements for public necessity must be more strictly applied, the project approval process must be ensured to be fair, and the compensation system must be improved to fully protect the rights and interests of those subject to expropriation. To this end, several improvement measures are proposed. First, regarding public necessity, the current scope of public projects in Korea is overly broad, which can lead to cases where private development projects abuse the right to expropriation under the guise of public interest. Therefore, the definition of public projects must be clarified, and legal mechanisms must be established to restrict expropriation for projects that lack public necessity. To this end, Korea should introduce an independent review body for public necessity verification and strengthen public hearings and public opinion gathering procedures to enhance fairness and transparency. For private-sector-led projects, the project approval process should be significantly reduced, the Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's sole approval authority should be reduced, and an independent review committee should be established to jointly review project approval. Furthermore, the objectivity of the process should be ensured by mandating expert evaluations and establishing a system for disclosing the results. Furthermore, in terms of compensation, the current appraisal process often fails to accurately reflect market value, resulting in frequent instances of expropriated land not receiving fair compensation. This problem is largely due to the structure of the appraisal process, which is susceptible to the influence of project developers. Therefore, a compensation system that reflects actual transaction prices should be established to ensure that expropriated land is acquired on a substantially equivalent basis. Appraisal standards should be improved to ensure fairness and objectivity in the compensation calculation process. In addition, it is necessary to reexamine whether the current method of completely excluding development profits arising from public expropriation from the scope of compensation is appropriate, and as a means of improving this, it is necessary to introduce the concept of fair market value.