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

Migration Jurisprudence from the South › South Korea

Severance pay paid only after departure

Constitutional Court of Korea · South Korea · 2016-03-31 · National court

Citation: 2014Hun-Ma367
Type of case: Constitutional and human rights
Outcome: Decided against the migrant side

Question

May the law make migrant workers wait until they leave Korea to receive their departure guarantee insurance (severance)?

What the court decided

Yes. The Court found the rule, meant to discourage overstaying, constitutional.

In plain language

Korea pays migrant workers’ severance only once they leave the country. Workers said this was unfair. The Constitutional Court kept the rule.

Dalam bahasa sederhana

Korea membayar pesangon pekerja migran hanya setelah mereka meninggalkan negara itu. Pekerja menyebutnya tidak adil. MK mempertahankan aturan itu.

Pertanyaan: Bolehkah UU membuat pekerja migran menunggu sampai meninggalkan Korea untuk menerima asuransi jaminan keberangkatan (pesangon)?

What happened afterwards

  • 2016-03-31: 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-severance-2016/. 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.

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