Supreme Court orders Nippon Steel to pay forced labor victim's family
Korea's Supreme Court ordered Nippon Steel to pay $56,600 to the family of a victim forcibly mobilized during Japan's colonial rule.
The family and attorney of the late Min Mun-sik, a victim of forced labor by Nippon Steel, speak to reporters after the Supreme Court ruling in Seocho District, southern Seoul, on Aug. 12.
YONHAP
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in favor of the family of a forced labor victim from Japan's colonial rule in a damages suit against Nippon Steel, ordering the company to pay 80 million won ($56,600).
The court dismissed Nippon Steel's appeal and finalized a lower-court ruling that partially sided with the family of Min Mun-sik, a forced labor victim, in the damages suit the five family members had filed against the company.
Min was forcibly mobilized in 1942, during Japan's 1910-1945 colonial rule, to work at Nippon Steel's factory in Japan. He returned to Korea in 1945 and died in April 1989. His children and other family members filed the damages suit against Nippon Steel in April 2019, arguing they suffered physical and psychological harm as a result of Min's unlawful forced mobilization.
The case turned on whether the legal window to file such a damages claim had already expired. Under Korean law, the right to seek damages lapses three years after the victim becomes aware of the harm and the party responsible, or 10 years after the unlawful act occurred, whichever is relevant — unless there was an "objective impediment that made it practically impossible to exercise the right," in which case the statute of limitations begins running only once that impediment is resolved.
Families of forced labor victims had for years largely given up on filing suits, believing individual claims had been extinguished under the 1965 Korea-Japan Claims Settlement Agreement, a treaty in which Japan provided Korea with grants and loans in exchange for settling wartime compensation claims between the two countries. That changed in 2012, when the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that individual claims had not been extinguished by the agreement, reversing and remanding a lower-court ruling that had rejected the claims. The case was finalized in 2018, when the Supreme Court's en banc panel confirmed on retrial that Japanese companies bore liability.
In this case, the first trial ruled against the family, finding the statute of limitations had already expired. It used the Supreme Court's 2012 remand ruling as the starting point for the statute of limitations, concluding it had lapsed three years after that. The second trial, however, used the 2018 en banc ruling as the starting point and ordered Nippon Steel to pay the family 80 million won ($56,600) in total. The Supreme Court dismissed Nippon Steel's appeal and finalized the ruling partially in the family's favor.
In December 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate suit brought by forced labor victims and their families that "it is reasonable to view that an objective impediment making it practically impossible to exercise the right existed until the en banc ruling was handed down in 2018." Rulings in favor of victims' families have followed since. The Supreme Court issued a ruling with the same reasoning in December of last year, in another damages suit a victim's family brought against Nippon Steel.
BY JO SU-BIN [lee.jian@joongang.co.kr]
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
