9. The Committee is concerned that a comprehensive anti-discrimination law has still not been adopted by the State party owing to the fact that the anti-discrimination bill submitted to the seventeenth National Assembly in December 2007 was discarded without consideration. The Committee is also concerned that the present version under assessment by the task force does not exclusively enumerate anti-discrimination grounds, but rather stipulates a list of typical anti-discrimination grounds as an example, and that it only contains certain grounds for discrimination, excluding others that had been indicated in the original bill, such as nationality and sexual orientation (art. 2).

The Committee urges the State party to adopt expeditiously a comprehensive anti- discrimination law that clearly spells out all the grounds for discrimination, as set out by article 2.2 of the Covenant and in line with the Committee’s general comment No. 20 on non-discrimination in economic, social and cultural rights (art. 2, para. 2).

Link to full text of the report: Concluding Observations-CESCR-Republic of Korea-2009-eng