The residual gauge symmetry(RGS) is the local gauge symmetry remaining even after imposing the gauge fixing condition. Although this symmetry is “spontaneously broken” in the perturbative vacuum, it can be restored in the true confining vacuum of QCD. Therefore, a color confinement criterion is obtained as the condition of restoration of the RGS, namely, disappearance of the massless Nambu-Goldstone pole associated with this spontaneous breaking, provided that the color confinement phase is a disordered phase where all internal symmetries remain unbroken. In the Lorenz gauge, indeed, it was shown by Hata that the restoration condition is identical to the Kugo-Ojima color confinement criterion, if the gauge transformation function $\omega (x)$ for the residual gauge symmetry is taken to be linear in $x$. However, this result was obtained without regard to topological configurations.
In this talk, we reconsider this issue by taking into account topological defects that are expected to play the dominant role for realizing confinement in the non-perturbative way.