유럽헌법학회

A state is a political organization with ultimate sovereignty. From the perspective of national sustainability, it is a kind of intergenerational community established under contracts between current and future generation. However, it is difficult for those who have not reached to the age for suffrage to directly participate in politics since the political decision-making structure in modern democracy has legitimate governance structure through elections, which tends to exclude future generation from political consideration. In addition, it is difficult to obtain legal remedy through litigations due to strict litigation requirements and the difficulty of proving future risks. Discussions on the revision of the Constitution in terms of the state’s responsibility for future generation in the area of environmental rights have been taken since 2018 without success. What needs to be done at the moment is to find ways to establish organizations and procedures for future generation and have in-depth discussion on legislative issues in institutionalizing such organizations and procedures. It would be more practical to develop constitutional rationale to protect future generation. To this end, this article categorizes the legislative models of major countries into four types for comparison. First type of legislative model is countries like Netherlands and Denmark which embed the right of express opinions into the education laws for the future generation co-living with the current generation to directly participate in school steering committees or to present opinions in curriculum. Second type is countries like Israel and Finland which established a future generation committee or a future committee within their parliaments so that the system of examining bills affecting future generation can be in place. Third type is the appointment of ombudsman of future generation within the executive branch like Sweden or Wales so that the implementation of individual policies set as K-SDGs can be overseen and policy recommendations can be provided for future generation. Fourth is to institutionalize the evaluation of sustainability which analyzes long-term effect of a bill like Germany so that the ex-ante evaluation of a bill as to its impact on future generation can be done systematically. The legislative balance in protecting future generation could be achieved when the evaluation result of K-SDGs is to be submitted together with a bill for the review by the future generation committee. The legislative process has a distinction that a decision making at the present implies the future influence. In this context, the acceptance of such legislative models and the rationales and legitimacy of the intergenerational contracts would fall to the current decision-makers, in other words the current generation. Therefore, the realization of the intergenerational contract for the intergenerational protection and solidarity would be achieved inevitably by the current generation and their responsibility for future generation. That is the reason why the foundation for the protection of future generation must be laid promptly through the efforts of the current generation now as opposed to later.