South Korea’s Supreme Court rules in favor of not disclosing the 2015 Seoul-Tokyo pact on sexual slavery

June 1 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Supreme Court of South Korea has ruled this Thursday in favor of the decision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to disclose the agreement between Seoul and Tokyo of 2015 on the sexual slavery of Korean women during the imperial era of Japan in order not to cloud bilateral relations.

The agreement, which aimed to address diplomatic problems in bilateral relations between the two countries, “irreversibly” resolved the matter, for which Japan promised to apologize and create a fund to compensate victims and their families endowed with with 1,000 million yen (about eight million euros).

Then, in 2016, a lawyer filed a lawsuit against the Foreign Minister in which he demanded the disclosure of the minutes of the negotiations that led to the agreement in order to find out if Japan acknowledges the responsibility of its Army and Government in the crimes.

A court initially ruled in favor of the lawyer and ordered the disclosure of the documents, citing public interest and the citizen’s right to information. However, an appeals court overturned the first ruling, arguing that the relationship between South Korea and Japan could be affected after its publication.

The aforementioned agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments on the so-called ‘comfort women’, the nearly 200,000 Koreans who were used as sex slaves by Japanese troops during Japan’s colonial period on the Korean peninsula (1910-1945), it did not meet the needs of the victims, according to a committee of the South Korean Foreign Ministry.