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Is it in the national interest to sit like “I will never accept it” (Prime Minister Kan) (Photo is from January 7)
In 2020, as the new corona virus spread around the world, the situation in which the deterioration of relations between Japan and Korea appeared to be confused continued. As mentioned in this column, in August this year, even though there was a “charge” on the defendant’s Japanese corporate assets due to the long-standing hiring problem and the deadline to destroy the Japan-Korea GSOMIA, both countries. It wasn’t as tense as it was two years ago and has been relatively quiet ever since.
However, on January 8, 2021, news came out of South Korea that could greatly shake up Japan-Korea relations. In other words, it is a ruling on the comfort women issue of the Seoul Central District Court. In this case, 12 former Japanese comfort women (including the deceased one) requested damages from the Japanese government, and the Seoul Central District Court accepted the plaintiff’s request, and the Japanese government received around 9.5 million per person. It is supposed to order a compensation of yen (100 million won).
This time the accused is the Japanese government.
In some media and social media discussions about this ruling, there is growing opposition that it violates the 2015 comfort women agreement, which “confirmed the definitive and irreversible solution to the comfort women problem.” Prime Minister Kan also emphasized in an interview with a journalist that “the Japan-Korea Claims Agreement of 1965 has been fully and finally resolved,” and sees this problem in the same framework of “comfort woman issue” as before. . It seems.
However, the most important point of this decision is not that it is related to the “comfort woman problem” or that the Japanese side lost the case. The significance of this ruling is that it was a civil lawsuit filed in a Korean court, and yet jurisdiction was granted over the foreign government, the Japanese government, and as a result, the Japanese government lost the case. ..
To understand this, the principle of “exemption from sovereignty” that the sovereign nation is not subject to the jurisdiction of other nations under the principle of national sovereignty and equal sovereignty is important to the international community. You should know that it exists as one of the international customary laws. This principle originally prevents influential nations from intervening in the sovereignty of other nations through their own judicial decisions through their own arbitrary legal interpretations in the international community where each sovereign nation must be equal. Is for.
In other words, in the absence of this principle, it would be possible for a large country to impose a sentence in its own court and intervene in a small country. The implications of this would become clear, for example, when a dictatorship with enormous power imposes its actions on the small neighboring countries as a sentence of its own court. That is why the principle that no nation is subject to the jurisdiction of another country is recognized as one of the important international customs laws.
From this point of view, this judgment directly conflicts with this principle of “exemption from sovereignty” in the sense that the Korean court will assume the legal responsibility of the Japanese government on the basis of Korean law. is there. That is why the Japanese government has continued to quietly kill the trial, saying that the Korean court has no jurisdiction over the Japanese government’s liability.
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