2026 Supreme Court Ruling on an Accident at Childcare center

A one-year-old wanders alone through a childcare center for twenty-five minutes. No teacher is watching him. He walks into an unlocked kitchen and falls into a pot of hot soup left on the floor.

The center's director was charged with a workplace negligence offense for the child's injuries. Her defense was: she had assigned staff to watch the children. She ran regular safety training. She could not personally verify that every teacher followed every instruction at every moment.

An appellate court accepted that defense and acquitted her. However, on July 16, 2026, the Supreme Court of Korea reversed it (2026Do1036). Any manager in Korea who delegates a safety-critical task to subordinates should read this case carefully.

The Facts

A mother brought her one-year-old son to the center for an enrollment consultation. While she met with the director in the director's office, the child kept trying to leave the room. The director told the mother to let him go, saying the center was safe and there were teachers outside. She then took the child out of the office, called out to unspecified teachers in the common room to "watch the kid," and went back inside to continue the consultation.

No teacher was actually assigned to the child. He wandered the facility alone for about twenty-five minutes, entered an unlocked kitchen, and fell into a pot of hot soup on the floor. He suffered serious burns on his body.

When Does a Duty of Care Actually Arise?

Under the Infant Care Act as it stood before its August 8, 2023 amendment, childcare is defined as a social welfare service that protects and raises infants safely while providing age-appropriate education (Article 2, Paragraph 2). The Act requires that childcare be provided with the infant's interests as the top priority, in a safe and comfortable environment (Article 3, Paragraphs 1 and 2). A center's director oversees the facility and supervises the teaching staff (Article 18, Paragraph 1), and all childcare staff must exercise the care needed to protect infants' lives and safety (Article 18-2, Paragraph 2).

The Court held that these provisions place a supervisory duty of care on the director personally, not just on the institution in the abstract. The harder question is scope. Whose safety is the director actually responsible for, and how far does that responsibility go?

The Court’s view is as follows: whether a child falls within the scope of protection depends on whether the center has substantively assumed a duty of protection over that child. The specific precautions required depend on the child's age and stage of development, assessed reasonably and in context.

Applied here, the child had not completed enrollment but just came for counseling. However, The director personally separated him from his mother and took him into the center's care, even briefly, within the center's own space. That act alone was sufficient to substantively assume protective responsibility.

Delegation Is Not a Shield

The second part of the ruling is the one that can matter even outside the childcare context.

The appellate court had reasoned that because the director trained her staff regularly, she could not be held responsible for a specific staff member's specific lapse on a specific day. The Supreme Court disagreed. Once a court finds that the director's own failure to ensure real, effective supervision caused the accident, the fact that a cook's and a teacher's separate carelessness also contributed does not break the chain of causation. Concurrent negligence by subordinates does not absolve the person who had the underlying duty to make sure a safe system was actually working at the relevant moment.

In other words, a general training program is not interchangeable with an actual, functioning safety arrangement at the time it is needed. The Court drew a sharp line between "we have a policy" and "the policy was actually operating when it mattered."

Who Should Care About This Ruling

The reasoning underneath the statute, however, is general criminal negligence doctrine. It recognizes a duty of care once a person or institution substantively takes charge of another's safety, and it holds that a manager's own supervisory failure remains legally decisive even when a subordinate's separate mistake also plays a role. Korean courts have applied similar reasoning in other settings involving supervisors, site managers, and safety officers. Any manager in Korea who oversees people with less experience or authority, whether in a school, a retail floor, a warehouse, or a client-facing office, should read this case as a warning about a specific failure mode: giving a general instruction to an undefined group of people and treating the box as checked.

This post is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. For guidance on a specific supervisory liability or institutional safety issue, please consult qualified Korean counsel. Feel free to contact us as well.

© 2026 SJ Chun. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, copied, or republished, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from the author.