SEOUL – A judge in South Korea ruled Wednesday that Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japan during World War II cannot seek damages from the Japanese government in a South Korean court, a decision that angered and contradicted survivors was with an earlier ruling in January.
In the earlier ruling, 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 of two different judges in the Seoul Central District Court complicated the survivors’ decades of efforts to hold the Japanese government legally responsible for wartime sexual slavery. The two rulings also revealed that the South Korean judiciary was divided over Japan’s claim that international law protected it from lawsuits in foreign courts.
In January, a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government should come under Korean jurisdiction because the experience of Korean sex slaves was accompanied by “acts of anti-humanity systematically planned and committed by the Japanese Empire.” For such acts, Japan cannot claim exemption from a lawsuit in South Korea based on state sovereignty, he said.
The group of women in that case hailed the judge’s decision as a landmark, but Tokyo rejected the ruling. It also said a 2015 agreement that South Korea and Japan called “ final and irreversible ” finally settled the long-running dispute over comfort women. Earlier, in a 1993 statement, Japan apologized for the practice.
On Wednesday, another South Korean judge, Min Seong-cheol, sided with Japan and threw out the lawsuit filed by a separate group of former sex slaves. If courts begin to make exceptions to the principle of national sovereignty, “diplomatic clashes will become inevitable,” the judge said in his ruling. Mr. Min also cited the 2015 agreement whereby Japan acknowledged responsibility for his actions, again apologized to the women, and established a $ 8.3 million fund to help provide elderly care to survivors.
Some of the surviving women have accepted payments from the 2015 fund. Others rejected the agreement, saying it did not specify Japan’s “legal” responsibility or to make official reparations. The lawsuit, which was thrown out Wednesday, was filed in 2016 by 20 plaintiffs, including 11 former sex slaves. Only four of the eleven are still alive, and all are in their eighties or nineties.
Neither January’s nor Wednesday’s ruling is the final word on the matter. Prosecutors in the second lawsuit said they would seek the views of higher courts by appealing Wednesday’s decision.
“It will go down in history as an embarrassing case in which the judge shirked its duty as the last bastion of human rights,” said a Seoul advocacy group standing up for the women who filed the lawsuit. Lee Yong-soo, a former sex slave who joined the lawsuit, accused the judge of “having the right to pass judgment on war crimes and crimes against humanity,” her spokeswoman said. Ms. Lee also demanded that both governments ask the International Court of Justice to rule on the case.
“Women comforting” is the euphemism Japan has adopted for the nearly 200,000 young women – many of them Korean – who were forced or lured to work in Japanese military-run brothels before and during World War II. 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 over the past 30 years, according to Amnesty International.
The survivors lost in all those cases before winning their case in South Korean court in January.
“What was a milestone for the survivors after waiting too long is now being called into question again,” Arnold Fang, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International, said in criticism of the court ruling on Wednesday. “More than 70 years have passed since the end of World War II, and we cannot stress enough the urgency for the Japanese government to stop depriving these survivors of their right to full compensation and to have an effective remedy. “
In Tokyo, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s cabinet secretary, Katsunobu Kato, 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 position on the matter, but that “Japan’s stance is not changing at all.”
Washington has urged Seoul and Tokyo to strengthen ties so that allies can work more closely together to address the nuclear threat from North Korea and China’s growing military influence in the region. For years, Japan and South Korea have been shouting horns about comfort women and other historical issues arising from the Japanese colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
Tokyo insisted that all claims stemming from colonial rule, including those involving sexually enslaved women, were governed by the 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the two nations, as well as the 2015 Comfort Women Accord. Under the 1965 agreement, Japan provided South Korea with $ 500 million in aid and affordable loans.
The South Korean government did not immediately respond to Wednesday’s court ruling. But at a forum in Seoul on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong said that while his government had not given up on the 2015 deal, the victims and their demands should be “at the center” of any attempt to resolve the issue. unload.
Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.