A foreign national who has been defrauded, assaulted, or had property taken in Korea usually assumes two separate fights lie ahead: the criminal case the prosecutor runs, and a civil case they must run themselves.
There is a mechanism that can collapse the second into the first. The compensation order (배상명령) allows the criminal court, when convicting, to order the defendant to compensate the victim in the same judgment.
→Where It Comes From
The compensation order (배상명령) is governed by Article 25 of the Act on Special Cases Concerning Expedition of Legal Proceedings (소송촉진 등에 관한 특례법).
The provision allows a court, when pronouncing a guilty verdict at first or second instance in a criminal trial, to order compensation for loss caused by the offence. It may do so on the application of the victim or the victim’s heir, or on its own initiative.
That last point is worth noting and not relying on. Courts do act of their own motion, but a victim who applies and quantifies the loss is in a materially better position than one who waits.
→Which Offences Qualify
This is not available for every crime. Article 25(1) sets out a defined list, built principally around offences of violence, sexual offences, and property crimes — together with offences under the sexual violence and child and youth protection statutes.
In practice the cases foreign residents most often bring — fraud, theft, embezzlement, assault causing injury, destruction of property — tend to fall inside it. But the list is a list, and the first question in any case is whether the specific offence charged is on it. If it is not, the compensation order (배상명령) is unavailable no matter how clear the loss.
→What the Order Can Cover
The statute limits recovery to three heads:
- Direct property loss caused by the criminal act.
- Medical treatment costs arising from it.
- Consolation money (위자료) for the mental suffering caused.
The word doing the work is direct. Money the defendant took is within it. Lost business you would have earned had the fraud not occurred, the cost of flying back to Korea for hearings, the value of time spent dealing with the aftermath — these are consequential and generally fall outside what a compensation order (배상명령) will cover.
Where the real loss is largely consequential, a civil action remains the correct instrument, and the compensation order is not a substitute for it.
→When the Court Will Decline
The statute directs the court not to issue an order in certain situations — including where the victim’s name and address are not clear.
Beyond that, the practical filter is complexity. The compensation order exists to dispose of a straightforward money claim without a second proceeding. Where the amount is genuinely contested, where liability is shared with people who are not defendants, or where establishing the figure would require the criminal court to run what amounts to a civil trial, the application is refused and the victim is left to sue.
A refusal is not a finding that you are owed nothing. It decides only that this was the wrong forum, and the civil route stays open.
→What the Order Is Worth
A compensation order carries the force of an enforceable civil judgment. It can be used to attach a bank account, garnish wages, or execute against property, without going back to court to obtain a separate title.
For a foreign victim this is the practical attraction. The alternative — proving the same facts a second time in a civil court, in Korean, possibly from abroad, against a defendant who may by then be serving a sentence — is slower and considerably more expensive.
Two cautions. An order is not payment; a defendant with no assets is uncollectable whatever the document says. And the application should go in while the criminal case is still live at first or second instance. Once the criminal judgment becomes final, this route has closed and only a civil suit remains.