Institute for Migrant Rights
Railway line at Cianjur station, c. 1890 · KITLV, CC BY 4.0

Migration Jurisprudence from the South › South Korea

Limits on changing workplace (second challenge)

Constitutional Court of Korea · South Korea · 2021-12-23 · National court

Citation: 2020Hun-Ma395
Type of case: Constitutional and human rights
Outcome: Decided against the migrant side

Question

Do the Employment Permit System’s limits on changing workplace breach migrant workers’ freedom of occupation?

What the court decided

No. The Court again upheld the limits.

In plain language

Ten years after the first ruling, migrant workers again challenged the limits on changing employer. The Constitutional Court again kept them.

Dalam bahasa sederhana

Sepuluh tahun setelah putusan pertama, pekerja migran kembali menggugat batas pindah majikan. MK kembali mempertahankannya.

Pertanyaan: Apakah batas pindah tempat kerja dalam Sistem Izin Kerja melanggar kebebasan memilih pekerjaan?

What happened afterwards

  • 2021-12-23: Decision.

Sources

Open this decision in the interactive collection (compare, filter, Indonesian view, downloads).

Cite as: Institute for Migrant Rights (2026), Migration Jurisprudence from the South, version 0.1, https://theimr.org/court-decisions/d/kr-eps-2021/. This page summarizes a court decision for research and advocacy; it is not legal advice.

For researchers

This collection of decisions is built for empirical legal scholarship and socio-legal research on migration and the rights of migrant workers, as well as for advocacy.

The coded variables support statistical analysis in law: cross-national comparison, regression and event-history designs, and law and economics questions such as how recruitment fees, wage protection and limits on changing employer affect migrant workers. The data can be downloaded for replication.

Keywords: case law; jurisprudence; judicial decisions; comparative constitutional law; courts and migration; judicial behavior; litigation outcomes; refugee law; non-refoulement; citizenship and nationality; empirical legal studies; empirical legal scholarship; quantitative legal research; statistical analysis in law; law and economics; law and economics of migration; comparative law; socio-legal studies; legal pluralism; migration law; labor migration; migrant workers’ rights; human rights law; access to justice; Global South; Asia; Africa; Middle East; Latin America; Indonesia; open data; replication data.