자의 복리를 위한 친양자제도

Full Adoption's System for the welfare of the child

According to the conventional adoption system of Korea, an adopted child could not use his or her adoptive father's surname. As an adoption should have been disclosed by the documents that prove the family relationship, people had been reluctant to use an adoption. Even there were cases that some adopted children were reported just as the legitimate children. So, jurists and civil society argued that "For the welfare of the child, we should make a system that terminates the relationship between the adopted child and the natural parents, and generates the parent-child relationship between the adoptive parents and the adopted child." July 20, 1998, for the first time, the Department of Justice tried to enact the law on the full adoption system. As the 15th Congressional term expired May 29, 2000, the law was discarded automatically. Then, on October 16, 2000, the Department of Justice submitted Civil Code amendments to the National Assembly and on March 2, 2005, the proposed amendments of the Civil Code were passed by the National Assembly. And from January 1, 2008, the full adoption system was performed. However, it has been criticized that there is a limit to realize the intent of the full adoption system because the Civil Code requires full adoption requirements too strictly. Thus, the revision of the Civil Code of 2012 mitigates full adoption requirements as follows: First, the child to be adopted shall be a minor which means under the age of nineteen, not fifteen. Second, a request to the Family Court for full adoption may be accepted without the consent or approval of the natural parents in each case of the following conditions: 1) where the child’s agent by law has refused consent or approval without a justifiable reason, 2) where the natural parents with their own fault do not fulfill the child support obligations and visitation for three years or more, 3) where the natural parents has abused or deserted the adopted child or otherwise has severely impaired the welfare of the adopted child. But in the full adoption system of the Civil Code, there are some problems which need to be improved.