Who you were, in the eyes of the law
A crew member assigned to a vessel, a longshore worker loading it from the pier, a shipyard worker repairing it, a passenger aboard it, and a contractor flown out to a rig for a short rotation occupy five different positions, and they do not share one regime. The categories do not follow job titles; they turn on the connection between the person and the vessel, how much time was actually spent aboard, and what the work contributed to. People are often surprised by which one they fall into, and some sit near a line rather than squarely inside a category. A passenger's situation differs again, because terms printed on a ticket can point toward where a matter is heard at all. Working this out honestly comes first, because nearly every later question depends on the answer.
Where it happened, and under whose flag
Location matters here in ways that are not intuitive. Whether something occurred dockside, inside a port, in coastal waters, or well offshore can point toward different frameworks, and those boundaries are legal rather than geographic in any obvious sense. The vessel's flag, where the owner and the employing company are actually based, where the contract was signed, and where the voyage began and was meant to end all bear on which country's law a court would apply. For a Korean national aboard a foreign-flagged vessel, or a Korean company whose people are hurt abroad, these threads usually run through more than one country at once. None of that should be assumed from where the injury happened to occur; it is established from documents.
What settles the threshold question
The answer generally comes from paper rather than from memory. A crew list or assignment record, the contract and any collective agreement, the vessel's registration and ownership details, the voyage record, and whatever incident documentation exists will together show where a person sits. Where the picture is genuinely mixed - someone who moved between a vessel and the yard, or a contractor aboard for a few days - more than one framework may plausibly reach the same maritime injury, and which one is pursued becomes a reasoned choice rather than a given. We would rather tell you the threshold question is still open than hand you a confident answer built on the wrong frame. Once it is settled, the shape of everything downstream becomes much easier to describe.
