A Study on the Legislative Trends and Issues for the Enactment of the Local Council Act

Under the constitution, local councils are essential establishments. The purpose of this constitution is to solidify the democratic and institutional foundation of local autonomy, which is a device for realizing grassroots democracy, by making local councils, the political representative (representative) body of residents, a voting body of local governments. The system and reality in which local councils are in place are not always positive. Due to the substantial asymmetry and imbalance of empowerment in the institutional separation type (institutional confrontation type) local government system, the functions of monitoring, check, and resolution through local councils are facing limitations to some extent. In order to effectively respond to the possibility of misuse, abuse, despotism, and policy failure in a strong executive-centered autonomous administrative structure, the effective check and decision function of local councils is required, and the movement to enact the Local Council Act has continued. The movement to enact the Local Council Act is an attempt to re-establish the status of local councils and to improve or establish necessary legislation to match their roles and functions in accordance with their original purpose. In this paper, we tried to find a desirable direction for enacting local council laws in the future and suggest necessary alternatives by comparing and reviewing the core contents of various local council bills submitted to the National Assembly as legislative legislation. Given the experience that all five local council bills submitted to the 20th and 21st National Assembly have been discarded without proper review since 2018, it is not easy to be optimistic about whether the five local council bills currently pending in the 22nd National Assembly will be enacted. The independent enactment of the Local Council Act also means a significant change in the existing local autonomy law system. In seeking to enact the Local Council Act, public consensus and consent are required not only to consider the connection with the existing Local Autonomy Act, but also to the necessity of enacting the Local Council Act and the purpose of legislation to establish a new local council system. The National Assembly and the government should devise a desirable image of local councils in line with the new era of local autonomy that requires wide-area integration of local administration or active response to local extinction due to low birth rates and aging, and make a responsible legislative decision along with careful discussion and verification to enact the corresponding faithful and complete local council law.