The purpose of the Maritime Safety Tribunal System is to contribute to marine safety by clarifying the causes of marine accidents through an investigation and inquiry into marine accidents by Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal(KMST).
After the strandin...
The purpose of the Maritime Safety Tribunal System is to contribute to marine safety by clarifying the causes of marine accidents through an investigation and inquiry into marine accidents by Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal(KMST).
After the stranding events of tanker Sea Prince occurred in July 1995, the judgment of KMST is recognized as the opinion of the expert group and is having an effect on criminal prosecution as well as civil lawsuits.
Therefore, given these circumstances, the KMST will need to further improve the reliability of judgment with logical, scientific and objective investigation of the causes of marine accidents.
The International Maritime Organization(IMO) requires ships to install the Voyage Data Recorder(VDR) by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea(SOLAS) Chapter 5 Regulation 20 in order to identify the causes of marine accidents and to prevent the similar marine accidents in the future. As a result, the analysis of causes of marine accidents is being made more scientific and objective by using stored data in the VDR.
In addition, most ships engaged in international voyages are installed with the Alarm Monitoring System(AMS) for recording alarms and status of ship's machinery under the influence of the development of the IT technology. This is also important evidence for analysis of causes of marine accidents.
The stored data in the VDR or AMS, so-called “electronic evidence”, needs to be proven its integrity and authenticity to have the admissibility of evidence. But these are not easy to prove because the electronic evidence have several important features compared with physical evidence.
Recently, the Criminal Procedure Act as well as the Civil Procedure Act, many studies on the collection and admissibility of electronic evidence are in progress even though there is no sufficient studies about those in maritime safety tribunal.
Also, the Act on the Investigation and Inquiry into Marine Accident which is the basis of KMST has no regulations on the evidence and has yet to be established on the limit of application of the probative power and the admissibility of evidence, such as the Criminal Procedure Act and the Civil Procedure Act.
Therefore, this study examines the minimum standard respecting the admissibility of evidence, especially electronic evidence, in the Maritime Safety Tribunal System by analogy with basic principle of evidence of the Criminal Procedure Act, and establishes the limit of application of the probative power through comparison and analysis of the Criminal Procedure Act and the Civil Procedure Act with the Act on the Investigation and Inquiry into Marine Accident for more scientific and objective clarifying the causes of marine accidents.