KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

The 70-year-long division of South and North Korea has widened the gap between their legal systems. Over the past decades, many endeavors have been made to check differences in legislation between South and North Korea and to craft related integration plans in preparation for reunification, focusing on political and economic realms. However, in the areas of women and family, comprehensive studies for the reunification of Korea have yet to be sufficiently conducted. Moreover, a few existing research studies on North Korea's laws on women were limited to introducing pre-mid-1990s legal systems.

In the fields of women and family, both South and North Korea have seen many changes in legislation since the mid-1990s. In order to integrate and adjust women and family-related legal systems in a gender-sensitive way for the future reunification of Korea, systematic and comprehensive research on women and family-related laws in the two Koreas should be carried out. Therefore, this study was designed to look into changes in women and family-related laws of South and North Korea since their division, to analyze the current women and family-related legal systems in the North, to compare the systems of the two Koreas, and to thereby identify similarities and differences between the two regimes to get ready for the prospective reunification of Korea. To this end, Chapter I briefly describes the needs for and objectives of this study, as well as research content and methods, to show the general direction of research. Chapter II looks into the development process of women and family-related laws in the two Koreas by key period, concentrating upon women who engage in family and social lives, in order to identify the causes of differences between the two regimes. Chapter III deals with women and family-related laws of the two Koreas regarding gender equality, female labor, violence against women, female health and reproductive rights, family, and work-family balance, examining key content by sector. Lastly, based on such reviews, Chapter IV compares and analyzes the legal systems of the two Koreas and finally present the basic direction for consolidation of the two systems, assuming the reunification of Korea.

This paper is expected to provide the basic data for future research through the comprehensive and systematic study and analysis of women and family-related laws in South and North Korea and can also be used as preliminary materials for reunification policies that enable the gender-sensitive integration and adjustment of related legal systems in the process of reunifying Korea. Moreover, it is deemed to make contributions to raising North Korean women's awareness of their rights and establishing the direction of education on reunification laws but unfortunately fails to compare and analyze women and family-related laws in more diverse contexts due to limited access to data. We look forward to seeing that more active academic exchange between South and North Korea enables a more realistic and effective review of legal systems in the two regimes.