情報公開請求權의 濫用

Abstract

This paper is a critical note about the Supreme Court 2014. 12. 24. judgment 2014du9349 ruling that limited requests for information disclosure for the first time by applying the principle of prohibition of the abuse of rights. The fact that the principle of prohibition of the abuse of rights can be applied to the right to request to disclose information has been acknowledged as a general doctrine from long ago. However, this case is the first one where a concrete case was judged to be the abuse of rights. The plaintiff of the subject case is a prisoner in a correctional institution who repeatedly requested to disclose information several hundred times. Although decision to disclose information was made in many of the cases, the plaintiff did not receive information. The Supreme Court judged that the plaintiff requested to disclose information not for access to information but for obtaining monetary gains by wining suits seeking for revoke of disposition of refusal when the requests had been refused to receive larger amounts of money as costs of lawsuit than the amounts of money actually spent or for avoiding prison labor by appearing in court on the dates for pleadings during imprisonment and that the request for information disclosure could not be accepted because the plaintiff 'was trying to obtain unjust benefits based on social common notions with no intention to acquire or utilize the relevant information in fact'. Since the subject ruling is based on the premise that due to the nature of the right to request information disclosure, the prohibition of the abuse of rights could be applied only in limited cases and the issue in the subject ruling falls under very extreme cases, the judgment of the Supreme Court in this case seems to be valid. However, there is concern that taking this ruling as an opportunity, public institutions may try to excessively apply the principle of prohibition of the abuse of rights. In addition, given that the reason why the plaintiff could obtain unjust benefits is partly the fact that in may cases, public institutions made wrong judgment and made disposition of refusal for information that did not fall under reasons for non-disclosure, public institutions' policies to respond to requests for information disclosure should be rechecked.