trafficking.
The Commission also organized a meeting to brief on the report to the members of the
Committee on the Rights of the Child on September 20, 2011 prior to deliberation. On
September 21, a number of committee members asked questions based on the opinion
report, and the final opinion was found to reflect much of the Commission’s opinion,
which indicates that the opinion report of the Commission has contributed to deliberation
by the Committee on the Rights of the Child on the government report.
13) Opinion on the Proposed Partial Amendment to the Act on Administration and Treatment
of Correctional Institution Inmates
The Commission expressed its concerns to the Chairman of the National Assembly on
the Proposed Partial Amendment to the Act on Administration and Treatment of
Correctional Institution Inmates that included: i) the amendment may infringe the
prisoners’ right to health and the family’s right to information as it seeks to limit medical
conditions requiring outside care that should be informed to family members to ‘serious
treatments such as hospitalization or surgery’; ii) the amended ground for correspondence
censorship, ‘when there is a reason for suspicion’, is too abstract and general and may
induce arbitrary interpretation and excessive censorship. It may even infringe the freedom
of communication as it beats the purpose of the amendment for failing to address the issue
of ambiguous grounds for censorship within the current regulation; iii) although there are
reasonable grounds to restrict access to certain publications deemed greatly inappropriate
for correctional or disciplinary purposes, attempts to screen publications for their violent or
explicit contents aside from review of the Korea Publication Ethics Commission and
restrict access by prisoners may be considered as an abuse of power and prejudice and
violation of right to information; iv) 3-day waiting period given for unclaimed body of a
deceased prisoner to be cremated seems insufficient to perform a proper death notification
and should be extended. (September 22, 2011)
Chapter 1. Improvement of Laws, Regulations, Policies and Practices
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