Victims lured into North Korea by lies welcome Japan court’s ruling against regime

People on ships bound for North Korea wave to a crowd gathered at Niigata port in Japan, in this Dec. 14, 1959, file photo. Victims and human rights groups on Tuesday welcomed the Japanese high court's ruling in favor of the victims. Courtesy of Kojima Hidenori

Victims, who were lured into North Korea by its false promises of a “paradise on Earth,” have welcomed the Japanese high court’s ruling against the regime and a pro-North Korean group.

“It is a great accomplishment,” Lee So-ra, a director of a group supporting the survivors and a daughter of one of the nearly 100,000 people who moved to North Korea under a 1959-84 resettlement program, told The Korea Times on Tuesday.

“This bears a symbolic meaning for the human rights violations committed in Japan by North Korea (and its agent) in terms of holding them accountable within the justice system.”

The Tokyo High Court ruled, Monday, that Japan’s judiciary has jurisdiction over the case and found that North Korea’s government violated the four plaintiffs’ rights by enticing them with disinformation and confining them in its territory where they suffered from a lack of food among many other miserable conditions.

The appeals court sent the case back to the Tokyo District Court, which ruled in March 2022 that their suffering occurred outside Japan and, therefore, was not under its jurisdiction.

The plaintiffs appealed the decision, saying they would not have gone through it all if it had not been for the lies from Chongryon, a Tokyo-based pro-North Korean organization.

“The verdict also opened a path for all victims of the settlement program and those of other North Korean crimes to file lawsuits in the future as it settled the dispute over jurisdiction,” Lee said.

Under the high court ruling, the district court must review the fraud in Japan and captivity in North Korea as a single case, which the judges in both courts have already acknowledged as a criminal offense, said Shin Hee-seok, a legal analyst at Transitional Justice Working Group, a Seoul-based NGO.

“It is welcome that the appeals court recognized North Korea’s false propaganda and captivity as a ‘continuous tort’ and remanded the case to the district court,” he said. “If the district court rules against North Korea on remand (as expected), it will be a victory for justice and accountability.”

Shin added that the plaintiffs’ tribunal win would be “a great vindication” for all victims of the North Korean crime and would preserve the relevant materials as court documents for posterity, even though impact litigations like that might not result in immediate changes or even compensation.

In 1959, North Korea launched a resettlement program to bring back ethnic Koreans located overseas as the regime was trying to make up for workers lost during the 1950-53 Korean War. Many in Japan, where they had suffered discrimination, found the message spread by Chongryon attractive; they were told there was no discrimination there and everything from education to food would be completely free.

Some 93,000 people left for the self-claimed utopia, but upon arrival they realized that they had been deceived. By then it was too late.

Kim Deog-young, a film director who is working on a new documentary about their suffering, also welcomed the ruling.

“I know countless cases in which people fled oppression under a communist or a totalitarian regime. But this was the only case in which nearly 100,000 people voluntarily moved to one based on false promises,” he said. “I hope the ruling would help the victims to recover from a long period of pain and suffering."