SEOUL – A South Korean judge ruled on Wednesday that Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japan during World War II could not seek compensation from the Japanese government in a South Korean court, a ruling that survivors angered and contradicts a previous ruling in January.
In the previous ruling, the judge ordered the Japanese government to pay 100 million won ($ 89,400) each to 12 former Korean sex slaves, known as ‘comfort women’.
The two different rulings by two different judges in the Central District Court in Seoul hampered the survivors’ decades-long attempt to hold the Japanese government legally liable for sexual slavery during war. The two rulings also showed that the South Korean judiciary was divided over Japan’s claim that international law protected it from litigation in foreign courts.
In January, the South Korean judge ruled that the Japanese government should be under Korean jurisdiction because the experience of Korean sex slaves ‘acts against humanity systematically planned and executed by the Japanese Empire’. For such acts, Japan cannot demand exemption from a lawsuit in South Korea based on state sovereignty, he said.
The group of women in that case regarded the judge’s decision as an important victory, but Tokyo rejected the decision. It also said that a 2015 agreement, which South Korea and Japan called “final and irreversible”, permanently settled the long-running dispute over comfort women. Previously, Japan issued a formal apology for the practice in a 1993 statement.
On Wednesday, another South Korean judge, Min Seong-cheol, sided with Japan and dropped the case filed by a separate group of former sex slaves. If courts begin to make exceptions to the principle of national sovereignty, ‘diplomatic clashes become inevitable’, the judge said in his ruling. Mr. Few also cited the 2015 agreement, under which Japan acknowledged responsibility for its actions, apologized to the women anew and set up a $ 8.3 million fund to help care for the elderly.
Some of the surviving women accepted payments from the 2015 fund. Others rejected the agreement, saying it did not specify Japan’s “legal” responsibility or provide official compensation. The case, which was dropped on Wednesday, was filed in 2016 by 20 plaintiffs, including 11 former sex slaves. Only four of the 11 are still alive, and all are in their 80s or 90s.
Neither the verdict in January nor the verdict on Wednesday is the last word on the case. The plaintiffs in the second lawsuit said they would seek the advice of higher courts by appealing Wednesday’s ruling.
“It will go down in history as a disgraceful case where the judge has renounced his duty as a last bastion of human rights,” said a group of advocates in Seoul who spoke for the women who filed the case. Lee Yong-soo, a former sex slave who joined the lawsuit, accused the judge of “denying the victims the right to be convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity”, according to a statement from her spokeswoman. Ms Lee also demanded that both governments ask the International Court of Justice to rule on the matter.
“Comfort women” is the euphemism that Japan adopted for the nearly 200,000 young women – many of them Koreans – who were forced or lured to work in brothels run by the Japanese military before and during World War II. Over the past thirty years, survivors of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, China and the Netherlands have filed a total of ten lawsuits against the Japanese government in Japanese courts, Amnesty International said.
The survivors lost in all these cases before winning their case in the South Korean court in January.
“What was an important victory for the survivors after too long a wait is now being called into question,” Arnold Fang, a researcher from East Asia at Amnesty International, said in criticism of Wednesday’s court decision. “More than 70 years have passed since the end of World War II, and we can not exaggerate the urgency of the Japanese government to stop depriving these survivors of their rights to full compensation and an effective remedy within their lifetime. does not offer. “
In Tokyo, Katsunobu Kato, general secretary of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, said the Japanese government planned to review the ruling in detail before commenting on it. He added that his government could not answer whether the new decision reflected a change in South Korea’s stance on the issue, but that “Japan’s attitude did not change at all.”
Washington has urged Seoul and Tokyo to improve ties so that the allies can work more closely together to address North Korea’s nuclear threat and China’s growing military influence in the region. For years, Japan and South Korea have been closing their horns over women’s comfort and other historical issues stemming from Japan’s colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
Tokyo insisted that all claims arising from its colonial rule, including those concerning sexually addicted women, be settled by the 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries, as well as the 2015 women agreement is. Under the 1965 agreement, Japan provided $ 500 million in aid and affordable loans to South Korea.
The South Korean government did not immediately comment on Wednesday’s ruling. But during a forum in Seoul on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong said that although his government did not abandon the 2015 agreement, the victims and their demands should be ‘in the middle’ of any attempt to solve the problem.
Hisako Ueno reporting from Tokyo.