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Volunteering legal professionals look at a table where Hansen’s disease patients underwent forced sterilization and abortions

A special court session took place on June 20 at Sorokdo National Hospital in Goheung County, South Jeolla Province. It was arranged so the second trial court in a suit by 139 Hansen’s disease (also called leprosy) patients claiming damages from the state could hear directly about their forcible sterilization and abortions. As the first visit by a judge in the 100 years since the hospital was founded in 1916, it was seen as a symbolic moment in the patients’ long battle to have their human rights recognized. This case and five other group lawsuits by Hansen’s disease patients are moving slowly due to repeated government appeals - but the suits themselves would have been unimaginable before the ‘00s. Back then, the brutalization the patients suffered from the state fell in the oblivion of a legal dead zone, where even practitioners of the law weren’t aware of the issue.

It was in 2001 that a ray of light peeked through. That May, a local court in Kumamoto, Japan, ruled that it was unconstitutional for the state to segregate Hansen’s patients. The country’s Leprosy Prevention Law was abolished, and the Japanese government enacted a new law for compensation payments to those institutionalized at Hansen‘s disease sanatoriums. Yasuyuki Tokuda, the attorney behind the suit, heard about the forcible internment of South Korean Hansen’s patients during the Japanese occupation and contacted local attorneys to locate victims. In his view, victims of state violence could not be separated into citizens of his own country and non-citizens - and he himself was forced into the position of perpetrator against the non-citizens. His story inspired the formation of a team of over 50 lawyers in South Korea.

In 2003, 117 patients from Sorokdo National Hospital finally applied for compensation from the Japanese government. After they were turned down, they filed suit again in Tokyo District Court. Japanese attorneys assumed all costs for the suit. The plaintiffs lost their first suit in Oct. 2005, but an amendment to the compensation law passed by the Diet of Japan in Feb. 2006 finally entitled South Korean Hansen’s patients during the Japanese occupation to compensation. The lawsuits currently under way in South Korea are calling for responsibility from the post-liberation South Korean government. But what explains the two years it took between Tokuda’s efforts in South Korea and the application for compensation from Japan?

“When Tokuda first visited Sorok Island, all the Hansen‘s patients there laughed at him. They didn’t have a single memory of being protected by the law, but they had some very vivid memories of suffering at the hands of the Japanese during the occupation. It was through opening up, through being sincere and talking to them and building bonds that he was able to assemble the plaintiffs one by one.”

Cho Young-sun, an attorney who has played a leading role in lawsuits by Hansen‘s patients, said it was “the way legal practitioners in the country responsible waited humbly and persistently that allowed Hansen’s patients in South Korea to control the law.”

Last May saw the publication of “Truth Inscribed in Court,” a record of the legal battle by elderly former members of the Korean Women’s Volunteer Labor Corps who had been mobilized to do forced labor for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. It included information about the activities of the Nagoya Litigation Support Association, which paid for the plaintiffs’ airfare and accommodations over the ten-year course of their trial from 1999 on, and a joint counsel team that provided free arguments. The suit against Mitsubishi ended in Nov. 2008 with a loss before Japan‘s Supreme Court, but separate lawsuits against the Japanese government for atomic bomb-related damages have continued. A number of suits claiming damages from Mitsubishi are also being tried in South Korean courts. Attorney Jang Wan-ik, who is representing plaintiffs in South Korean cases, also directs the legal team in the Ku Su-jeong case.

“The conscientious way Japanese legal practitioners have acted has a lot of implications for us in our dealings with Vietnamese civilian victims,” Jang said.

By Ahn Young-choon, staff reporter

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