An appellate court on Thursday ordered a lower court to review its dismissal of a damages suit filed by about 80 South Korean victims of Japan’s wartime forced labor against Japanese companies.

The Seoul High Court issued the retrial order to the Seoul Central District Court, which rejected the damages suit launched by 85 forced labor victims and their families in June 2021, saying the plaintiffs do not have litigation rights.

The high court said it has decided to return the case to the district court because there is a “problem” in its ruling.

The plaintiffs started their damages suit against 16 Japanese companies, including Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corp., Nissan Chemical Corp. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., in 2015.

But the Seoul district court said South Korean wartime forced laborers cannot claim individual legal rights to damages from Japan, citing the 1965 agreement between Seoul and Tokyo on resolving colonial-era issues.

At that time, the decision caused a controversy because it
was in sharp contrast to an October 2018 ruling from the Supreme Court, which upheld an appeals court ruling in 2013 that ordered Nippon Steel to pay each of four Korean plaintiffs 100 million won (US$87,720) in compensation for their wartime forced labor and unpaid work.

According to government data, more than 1 million Koreans were conscripted to work for Japanese companies and its military during World War II. Korea was under Japan’s brutal colonial rule from 1910-45.

On the same day, meanwhile, the Seoul High Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that orders Mitsubishi Heavy to pay compensation of 10 million won to a South Korean forced labor victim, surnamed Kim.

Kim is one of 252 plaintiffs who sued Mitsubishi and two other Japanese companies in 2013 for compensation over wartime forced labor. The appellate and district courts dismissed or ruled against other plaintiffs’ claim for damages, due to litigation procedural problems or lack of evidence.

Source: Yonhap News Agency