South Korean ‘comfort women’ denied appeal on deal with Japan

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There are hardly any women left. Of the estimated 200,000 mainly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army in WWII, maybe a few dozen are still alive. And these women are still—nearly 75 years later—fighting to gain restitution from the country that forced them into sexual slavery, despite a “final and irreversible” deal reached between Korea and Japan in 2015.

Today, South Korea’s Constitutional Court dismissed the remaining women’s lawsuit to strike down the 2015 diplomatic agreement on the grounds that it violated their rights. They say they were not consulted and their demands were not met, therefore the deal had violated their property rights and their right to receive diplomatic protection from the state by not allowing them to seek further compensation, Japan’s Kyodo News reported.

While the court acknowledged that the pain the “comfort women” suffered was “not at all light,” it refused to rule on the verbal accord’s constitutionality, saying that it was a “political deal.” 

Under the agreement, Japan apologized to the survivors and provided 1 billion yen ($9 million) to compensate them while South Korea promised never to raise the issue again, according to The Korea Herald.

“When you are talking about victims of human rights abuses, you can’t come to a resolution without their presence and consent,” Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo, told The New York Times in early 2018. “As long as there are people who are not convinced that the apologies are heartfelt or that the compensation is adequate, then of course the aggressor would continue to ask for forgiveness and atonement.”

While the exact number of women forced to work in Japanese brothels has long been in dispute, recently unclassified documents show that during wartime, the Japanese army requested that one “comfort woman” be made available for every 70 soldiers. Scholars have said that by 1945, the army had 5.5 million Japanese soldiers. 

The ruling comes as relations between the two countries are at a low “due to South Korean anger over Japan’s wartime behavior,” the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported, thereby affecting trade. In July, Japan curbed the export to South Korea of high-tech material used in the production of semiconductors and display panels. Later, each company took the other off its list of favored trade partners.