The Geneva-based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) was considering the case of the woman, whose contract was not renewed in 2009 after she refused to undergo a secondary mandatory HIV test required only of foreigners, arguing it was “discriminatory and an affront to her dignity.”
In a statement released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Wednesday, CERD members noted that the Republic of Korea did not provide any reasons to justify the mandatory testing, from which Korean and ethnic Korean teachers were exempt.
They also noted that, during arbitration proceedings, the woman’s employers, the Uslan Metropolitan Office of Education (UMOE), said that HIV/AIDS tests were viewed as a means to check the values and morality of foreign English teachers.
The testing policy, the Committee wrote in its findings, “does not appear to be justified on public health grounds or any other ground, and is a breach of the right to work without distinction to race, colour, national or ethnic origin.”
The Committee called on the Republic of Korea to grant the woman adequate compensation for the moral and material damages she suffered.