Last night, I attempted to register Osam's birth online, but realized I had forgotten to prepare the birth certificate in advance. 😅 Hence, today, I decided to gather some more necessary documents from home and headed straight to the Community Welfare Center to register the birth in person. Having tried to fill in the online form up to the stage of uploading the birth certificate and having asked various questions during today's visit to the welfare center, I thought I'd provide a simple breakdown of the process for both online and offline registration based on my experience.
Required Documents:
- Common: Birth certificate (You can request this from departments like the patient affairs in the hospital where the surgery took place. It's provided immediately after verifying identity).
- For Online Registration: Digital Certificate (You need to have either a public or joint digital certificate. A simple certificate won't suffice).
- For In-Person Registration at the Welfare Center: ID card (The ID of the person registering the birth is essential).
Online Birth Registration:
Online birth registration can be done through the Supreme Court's Electronic Family Registration System.
Once you access the system and click on the 'birth' button, there's a process to select the hospital (medical institution) where the birth occurred. If the chosen hospital isn't linked with the system, then the birth registration might not process. After choosing the hospital, a terms of service agreement page appears, which mentions that both a 'digital certificate and a birth certificate' are required.
During the authentication step, you can use a joint digital certificate or financial certificate saved on your browser or hard drive. Although there are some platforms like KakaoTalk, Naver, and Pass that offer easy authentication, they weren't linked to the court system.
Once authenticated, the birth registration form appears. Most details about the parents are already filled out; you only need to add the baby's details. When registering in-person, in addition to the parents' main details, you also need to manually fill in all the information, which can be quite time-consuming.
I was stumped when asked to upload the birth certificate because I hadn't prepared it. Eventually, I decided to visit the Welfare Center in person today.
In-Person Registration:
You mainly need your ID and the birth certificate. The input process isn't much different from the online one, but it's a more tedious procedure. One notable difference is how the parents' and baby's names in Hanja (Chinese characters used in Korean) are filled out. It's a somewhat inefficient back-and-forth process of picking the right Hanja. Thankfully, once all fields are filled, the birth certificate gets issued immediately.
Differences:
Upon asking, I was told that both procedures essentially cover the same requirements. A noticeable distinction is that when registering online, it might take 3-7 days for the National Identification Number to be issued. In contrast, when registering in-person, it's issued immediately. I felt strangely elated when Osam's National Identification Number was immediately provided.
Remember, if you register either online or in-person and only complete the birth certificate, you still need to apply separately for the "Happy Birth One-Stop Service". The online application process isn't vastly different, but certain details might change depending on how you registered the birth.
Memories from April 7, 2023