Korean court orders Japan to compensate WWII sex slavery victims

A South Korean appellate court on Thursday ordered the Japanese government to pay compensation to the South Korean sex slavery victims during World War II.

The Seoul High Court ruled that Tokyo should pay 200 million won (154,000 million dollars) in compensation to each of the 16 plaintiffs, including sex slavery victims and their bereaved families, overturning a lower court’s ruling.

In April 2021, the lower court dismissed the damages suit filed by the plaintiffs in December 2016, citing a sovereign immunity that allows a state to be immune from a civil suit in foreign courts.

The appellate court said that it would be reasonable under customary international law to recognise the jurisdiction of the South Korean court over the defendant Japanese government.

It noted that Japan should pay appropriate compensation to the victims given the defendant’s illegal acts in the process of mobilising the comfort women.

Comfort Woman is an euphemism for the victims who were forced into sexual slavery by Imperial Japan’s military in brothels under the 1910–45 Japanese colonisation of the Korean Peninsula.

Historians say hundreds of thousands of Asian women, mostly from China and the Korean Peninsula, were kidnapped, coerced, or duped into sexual servitude by Japanese troops before and during the Pacific War.