Human rights lawyer; author of the biography of the labor activist Jeon Tae-il
| Life | 1947 ~ 1990 |
| Era | 현대 |
| Clan | 함안 조씨 |
Jo Yeong-rae (趙英來, 1947-1990) was a human rights lawyer classified as belonging to the Haman Jo clan: the Korean Wikipedia text does not state his seat directly but lists him under Haman Jo, and Namuwiki places him in the Rae (來) generation. He was born on 26 March 1947 in Daebong-dong, Daegu, the fourth of seven children and eldest son of Jo Min-je and Yi Nam-pil. After moving to Seoul and attending Gyeonggi Middle and High School, he entered Seoul National University's law college in 1965 as top scorer overall.
As a student he led protests against the Korea-Japan talks, election fraud and the Yushin constitution, and in 1970 was arrested in the Seoul National University conspiracy case and served about a year and a half. In 1974, while at the Judicial Research and Training Institute, he was wanted in the National Federation of Democratic Youth and Students case and lived in hiding for about six years; he was reinstated in 1981 and completed the institute in 1982. In 1983 he opened the Namdaemun joint law office and the Citizens' Public Interest Legal Counseling Center.
The Biography of Jeon Tae-il, prepared over about three years, came out first in Japan in 1983 and in Korea in 1991. He did not reveal himself as its author in his lifetime. He argued the 1984 Mangwon-dong flood case, the 1986 Bucheon police sexual torture case, the Park Jong-cheol torture death case and the press guideline case, and took part in founding Lawyers for a Democratic Society in 1988. Diagnosed with lung cancer in September 1990, he died on 12 December at the age of 43, and is said to have left Park Won-soon the words "See the wider world".
The 1984 Mangwon-dong flood case is introduced as the first large-scale class action in Korean judicial history. Jo Yeong-rae is said to have read extensively in civil engineering and hydrology to prove that the flood was man-made rather than a natural disaster, and the case is assessed as a trigger for considering a class-action system.
In the 1986 Bucheon police sexual torture case he argued alongside Park Won-soon, leading the drafting of the complaint, the shaping of public opinion and the courtroom fight over about four years. It led to punishment of the officer and a successful compensation claim against the state, and the case is counted as one of the triggers of the June Democracy Movement.
He played an important part in founding Jeongbeophoe, a standing group of human rights lawyers, and is assessed as having widened public-interest litigation from criminal cases to civil fields such as labor, poverty and pollution. A selection of his pleadings was published in 1992, and in the film A Single Spark (1995) the actor Moon Sung-keun is said to have played a character based on him. The novelist Jo Jeong-rae shares the Rae generation.
His tomb could not be confirmed here.