Ever since its transition to democratic governance, South Korea has had to reckon with the complicated legacy of its post-war dictatorship.

This has included various transitional justice commissions that have investigated decades of violence and human rights abuses, including massacres, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. One of these truth-seeking efforts resumed a little more than two years ago, when the Moon Jae-in administration relaunched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea (TRCK) in Dec. 2020.

The commission looked into abuse at Brothers Home welfare center, known in Korean as Hyungjae Bokjiwon, and found that hundreds had died at the facility linked to the most notorious incidents of the state’s anti-vagrant program, recommending strengthened supervision of social welfare institutions in its report released earlier this month. 

Indeed, such human rights violations are far from a relic of South Korea’s past. Multiple other reports from the past year have documented cases where such social welfare institutions have continued to abuse and intimidate patients, highlighting the need for reform.

Implementing changes will face numerous challenges, however. South Korea has higher than average rates of involuntary commitment compared to other developed countries, and the stigma around disability in Korea and concerns about increasing families’ burden of care have fueled vocal opposition to transitioning from long-term inpatient or residential treatment to integrated community-based care. 

Carrying out such a deinstitutionalization process nonetheless remains possible to achieve given enough time and a paradigm shift in South Korea. And this will require sustained engagement with countries that have made progress in empowering people with disabilities.

South Korean leader Chun Do-hwan awards the Order of Civil Merit to Park In-geun, the director of Brothers Welfare Center, May 1984. | Image: Brothers Welfare Center Management Archive 

A PAINFUL HISTORY

As South Korea transformed from an agricultural-based economy to one led by industry and machine manufacturing, the state faced challenges from domestic labor migration and unauthorized, unplanned settlements in urban areas. Unsuccessful attempts at relocating squatter settlements entrenched the state’s view that the urban poor constituted a threat to the social order and its efforts to improve the aesthetic beauty of urban space.  

Under the Social Welfare Services Act of 1970, privately run social welfare institutions were eligible for generous government subsidies, ranging from 65 to 85 percent of their operating costs. Although the state retained accountability for oversight and the supervision of the sector by law, it failed to exercise its regulatory authority consistently. This allowed facilities great latitude in managing their finances and deciding what type of care would be dispensed to their wards. 

The same decade, the Park Chung-hee government issued the extra-constitutional Ordinance 410, which allowed police to round up persons deemed to be vagrants and bring them back to their stations.​ There they were handed off to these privately run institutions with links to the Park government, without any hearing or arrest warrant being processed. Foreign aid agencies were forced to exit the country at the same time due to increased barriers to operate freely. 

Police pickups were ostensibly for the vulnerable people’s own protection. The reality, however, was that institutions received subsidies corresponding to the number of people under their care. With little or no oversight over how they used subsidies, directors of certain facilities, including Brothers Home, laundered and misappropriated the money they received. 

Survivors of the Brothers Home protest in front of the National Assembly, Nov. 11, 2015. | Image: Solidarity of Participation via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Brothers Home, based in the southeastern city of Busan, even made deals with police and city officials to round up as many “vagrants” as possible, with kickbacks from the laundered subsidies offered as incentives.

Victims at the Brothers Home welfare center were subject to malnutrition, poor hygiene, sexual violence, torture and even murder, according to the Truth Commission. TRCK found that 657 people lost their lives in the facility in just a 12-year-period between 1975 and 1987 

Meanwhile, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) has repeatedly raised concerns about new instances of human rights violations in social welfare institutions since publishing its 2009 National Report on Persons with Mental Disabilities. 

In 2022, the commission again investigated and expressed opinions in numerous cases where patients’ rights to self-determination and security were violated in the past year. This included but was not limited to emotional abuse and physical intimidation; the imposition of unfair labor in the name of occupational therapy; unreasonable limitations on individuals’ privacy and freedom of correspondence; non-consensual hospitalizations; and the improper management of admission and discharge procedures.

One of the TRCK’s recommendations in the Brothers Home case called on the government to strengthen its supervision of social welfare institutions that accommodate vulnerable people and review management practices to ensure the irreparable trauma and suffering experienced by those confined in the Brothers Home center are never again allowed to occur. 

With the COVID-19 pandemic drawing renewed attention to the highly precious situation of the confined, the TRCK’s recommendation plays into ongoing efforts by civic groups to highlight human rights violations in social welfare institutions as they campaign for deinstitutionalization. 

Survivors of Brothers Welfare Center on a hunger strike in front of the National Assembly, Dec. 13, 2015. | Image: Solidarity of Participation via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A LONG WAY TO GO

Despite improvements in supporting vulnerable people through the Disabilities Act and the revised Mental Health Act, progress toward achieving and consolidating deinstitutionalization remains a challenge. The country’s first deinstitutionalization roadmap, which was released last year, drew heavy criticism from civil society organizations for its focus on transforming existing institutions, being too slow, under-ambitious, and lacking sufficient support policies and budget to implement. 

The reality is that successful deinstitutionalization cannot happen overnight. It is a complex process that involves more than simply changing where and when care is delivered to those who depend on it. If respecting the best interests of vulnerable people is the objective, service planning cannot be done in haste. It must be tailored to the specific needs of individuals and the community stakeholders who support them. 

To begin working toward deinstitutionalization, South Korea could seek to engage peer countries that have made progress in replacing institutional care with more community-oriented care models, such as those in the Nordic region.

There may also be space for dialogue and information-sharing with Japan, which seeks similar reform, about how to overcome challenges like strong stigmatization against the disabled and systemic barriers. Seeking technical assistance from the Organization for Economic 

Cooperation and Development, which is currently helping Lithuania in this area, and leveraging its network of leaders in community-based mental health care could also prove useful in driving forward a more evidence-based reform process. 

In the meantime, the TRCK’s recommendation is an important reminder that improving and safeguarding the rights of people in institutions cannot be neglected. While it has yet to respond to the TRCK’s non-binding recommendations, the Yoon administration must heed its call, and direct relevant ministries and departments to regulate and rigorously enforce standards of care that uphold the dignity of institutionalized people nationwide. 

Edited by Arius Derr