日本의 石綿健康被害救濟法의 檢討

A Study on the law of compensating asbestos-related health injuries in Japan

Asbestos is a wonderful but harmful natural substance. It is plentiful, it has amazing fire-retardant qualities, and it can be formed into a variety of products that perform useful functions in ships, factories, and office buildings, other commercial and public facilities, and homes. Unfortunately, exposure to asbestos-containing products can also kill people. Asbestos exposure causes mesothelioma, a dreadful cancer that is always fatal. Asbestos is the only known cause of this cancer; only a few cases haveoccurred where victims were not known to have been exposed to asbestos and it is possible that those people were exposed without being aware of it. It is seemingly possible for people to get mesothelioma without prolonged intense exposure to asbestos; fortunately, however, only a small fraction of all those who have been exposed to asbestos, even those with heavy exposure, ever get mesothelioma. Asbestos exposure also causes a variety of other cancers, including lung cancer. Asbestos diseases are distinguished from many other common diseases by the fact that they often appear only many years after initial exposure. The government also bears significant responsibility for the surge in asbestos disease that began in the 1960s. With industry hostile to asbestos regulation and the government apparently disinterested in controlling asbestos disease, After the fatal riskiness was known to the society, most of developed countries should discontinue its consumption and besides making laws for the victims relief at the present time. Today, Congress is trying to make a law of the system of compensating asbestos-related injuries in Korea but until now there are no rulesfor the victims relief in Korea. So we need to study comparative laws for making victims relief laws in our society. We need laws to remove asbestos from the workplace and compensate workers who had been injured by asbestos. As a first step, Japanese law is introduced in this paper. In this article, I briefly describe some characters of asbestos and asbestos diseases, an outline and estimation of the law of compensating asbestos-related health injuries in Japan, compensating possibility by compensate workers who had been injured by asbestos.