SEOUL – A South Korean judge ruled on Wednesday that Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japan during World War II could not seek compensation from the Japanese government in a South Korean court, a decision that upset the survivors and contradicted an earlier ruling in January.
In the previous verdict, the presiding 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 decisions made by two different judges at the Seoul Central Court have complicated the efforts of decades of survivors to make the Japanese government legally responsible for war sexual slavery. The two judgments also showed that the South Korean judicial system was divided over Japan’s claim that international law protected it from lawsuits in foreign courts.
In January, the South Korean judge ruled that the Japanese government should be subject to Korean jurisdiction because the Korean sex slave experience involved “systematically planned and perpetrated anti-humanity acts by the Japanese Empire.” For such acts, Japan cannot claim exemption from a trial in South Korea based on state sovereignty, he said.
The women’s group in the case hailed the judge’s decision as a major victory, but Tokyo rejected the ruling. He also said that a 2015 agreement, which South Korea and Japan called “final and irreversible”, had finally resolved the long-running dispute over comfort women. Earlier, in a 1993 statement, Japan issued a formal apology for the practice.
On Wednesday, another South Korean judge, Min Seong-cheol, joined Japan and rejected the lawsuit filed by a separate group of former sex slaves. If the courts start making exceptions to the principle of national sovereignty, “diplomatic clashes become inevitable,” the judge said in his ruling. Min also cited the 2015 agreement that Japan recognized its responsibility for its actions, apologized again to women, and set up a $ 8.3 million fund to provide old age care to survivors. .
Some of the surviving women accepted payments from the 2015 fund. Others rejected the agreement, saying it did not specify Japan’s “legal” liability and did not offer official compensation. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday was filed in 2016 by 20 applicants, including 11 former sex slaves. Only four of the 11 are still alive and all are 80 or 90 years old.
Neither the January nor Wednesday judgments are the last word in this regard. The plaintiffs in the second trial said they would seek the advice of higher courts by appealing Wednesday’s decision.
“It will go down in history as a shameful case in which the judge evaded his duty as the last bastion of human rights,” said a Seoul advocacy group that speaks for the women who filed the lawsuit. Lee Yong-soo, a former sex slave who joined the trial, accused the judge of denying victims “the right to seek war crimes and anti-humanity crimes,” according to a statement from its spokesman. . Ms Lee also called on both governments to ask the International Court of Justice to rule on the case.
“Comfortable women” is the euphemism adopted by Japan for the nearly 200,000 young women – many of them Koreans – who were forced or lured to work in brothels run by the Japanese army before and during World War II. In the last 30 years, survivors from South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, China and the Netherlands have filed a total of 10 lawsuits against the Japanese government in Japanese courts, according to Amnesty International.
Survivors lost all of these cases before winning their case in the South Korean court in January.
“What was an important victory for the survivors after waiting too long is again being questioned,” said Arnold Fang, an East Asian researcher at Amnesty International, criticizing the court’s decision on Wednesday. “More than 70 years have passed since the end of World War II, and we cannot exaggerate the urgency of the Japanese government to stop depriving these survivors of their rights to full reparations and provide an effective remedy for the rest of their lives.”
In Tokyo, Katsunobu Kato, chief secretary to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, said the Japanese government intends to review the ruling in detail before commenting. He added that his government could not answer whether the new decision reflected a change in South Korea’s position on the issue, but that “Japan’s attitude is not changing at all.”
Washington has called on Seoul and Tokyo to improve ties so that allies can work more closely to address North Korea’s nuclear threat and China’s growing military influence in the region. For years, Japan and South Korea have blocked horns over comfort women and other historical issues stemming from Japan’s colonial rule in Korea from 1910 to 1945.
Tokyo insisted that all claims arising from its colonial rule, including those involving sexually enslaved women, were resolved by the 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the two nations, as well as the 2015 agreement for women of comfort. Under the 1965 agreement, Japan offered South Korea $ 500 million in affordable aid and loans.
The South Korean government did not immediately comment on Wednesday’s ruling. But at a forum in Seoul on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong said that while his government had not abandoned the 2015 agreement, victims and their demands must be “at the heart” of any effort to resolve the issue.
Hisako Ueno contributed to the Tokyo report.