치매환자가 야기한 손해와 제3자의 피해보전 - 일본 고베모델을 중심으로 -

Abstract

We are now living in what is known as the ‘100-year-old’ due to the development of medicine. We can see even more elderly people than ever before around us. It is also becoming common for elderly actors or actress to do as active activities as young ones through the media. Then, do the elderly people feel happy with this life extension? Human’s limit is that the human cannot be free from disease even though human’s life expectancy has been extended. So, the elderly do not like extending their lives amid the attack of such diseases. Especially, they fear dementia, which can completely destroy human dignity for the rest of their lives, which can cause loss of self and damage to their families and others. In the past, the legal and institutional support for people with dementia was extremely weak because the problems were only seen as the responsibility of the patients and their family. As a result, the pain of families of dementia patients got very severe and this caused the families to be broken up. As an improvement for this situation, the government enacted the Dementia Control Act and introduced the national responsibility system for dementia management in 2017 to implement various policies for dementia patients and their families. However, the current laws and systems related to Dementia are concentrated on dementia patients and their families. In other words, there is no system to guarantee the damage of the third parties caused by dementia patients. Of course, it is possible to resolve the issue through civil law, which stipulates responsibility for special illegal activities, but there are legislative limits that inevitably follow the interpretation theory in determining who is responsible for. Furthermore, if the person who is responsible for the damage does not have the resources to make up for the damage, the regulation cannot but be meaningless. Japan created and operated a model of Kobe to compensate the third party for the damages caused by dementia patients’ action, albeit at the local level. The aim is to create a city where dementia patients can live safely with ordinary people. I’ll introduce this as another direction that the Korean dementia management system should head for.