Interior ministry to fold safety council's plans into first life-safety master plan

South Korea's interior ministry will incorporate the outcome of the National Committee on People's Life and Safety's second full meeting into the country's first life-safety master plan, scheduled to take effect in June 2027, the ministry said Wednesday.

President Lee Jae-myung chaired the meeting at the presidential office in the afternoon, the first he has led since the Framework Act on Life Safety was enacted on June 2 and the committee launched on July 28. About 70 people attended, including private and government committee members and victims of disasters and their bereaved families.

The committee's agenda centered on a report by Vice Chairman Baek Jong-woo, a Kyung Hee University professor, who presented five shifts in the country's approach to safety: from cleaning up after accidents to preventing them, from ministry-by-ministry responsibility to national responsibility, from averaging across the population to putting the vulnerable first, from supporting victims to guaranteeing their rights, and from closing a case to learning from it and preventing recurrence.

Under those shifts, deaths in 15 categories including suicide and industrial accidents will be tracked continuously as outcome indicators and reviewed regularly under the president's chairmanship, the committee said. It put the annual average across those categories at 23,218 deaths between 2021 and 2025.

Lee told the opening session that the phrase "home safely today" had become a duty of the state, and that the law's success should be judged by lives actually saved rather than the number of measures produced. Speaking a day before the fourth anniversary of the Itaewon crowd crush, he said the country should reflect painfully on whether it had properly protected its citizens.

"No one should lose a life that could have been saved because it is not our ministry's remit, there are no rules, or the budget is short," Lee said, asking that the voices of victims and their families be reflected in policy. "I will work with you to build a country where every citizen returning home safely today is taken for granted."

The health ministry, the police agency, the employment and labor ministry and the interior ministry separately reported plans to reduce deaths from suicide and solitary deaths, from missing persons, from industrial accidents and from crowd surges. The interior ministry's measures focus on managing crowd risk at large gatherings and venues in advance and strengthening the response on the ground.

Committee member Oh Ji-won presented a plan to strengthen victims' rights, under which the 13 rights of disaster victims would be delivered on site from the earliest stage of an incident. It also calls for standing units at the central and local levels dedicated to victims and to vulnerable groups such as children, older people and people with disabilities, rather than the ad hoc arrangements set up after each disaster, and for a public advocate system to represent victims facing the government.

Survivors and bereaved families addressed the meeting directly. Families of the Itaewon victims urged the state to honor its duty to protect life and safety, relatives of workers killed on the job asked for the right to information and a role in investigations, and a representative of residents affected by wildfires in North Gyeongsang Province called for full recovery so that victims can rebuild their daily lives.

In the discussion that followed, member Yoo Hae-jung proposed a shared space where victims and bereaved families can meet, exchange information and respond together, along with simpler paperwork after a disaster and advance notice of when and how a government investigation will proceed.

The interior ministry is drawing up the life-safety master plan and will check progress on each ministry's reduction measures on a regular basis. The committee plans to open its website on Dec. 3, when the law takes effect.