The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the date of the ruling “The 2015 comfort women agreement is an official agreement” Why

On the 8th, when the court ruled the Japanese government to “compensate for the damages of comfort women,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “we respect the court’s judgment.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a comment in the name of Spokesman Choi Young-sam at 4:32 pm, about 6 hours and 30 minutes after the ruling, and said, “The government respects the judgment of the courts and makes efforts that our government can do to restore the honor and dignity of the comfort women victims. “We will do it all,” he said. “The government recalls that in December 2015, the comfort women agreement between Korea and Japan was an official agreement between the two governments.” He said, “We will make every effort to continue constructive and future-oriented cooperation between Korea and Japan by carefully examining the impact of this ruling on diplomatic relations.”
What caught the eye was the mention of the comfort women agreement. After the inauguration of the Moon Jae-in administration, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs formed a joint public-private task force (TF) in 2017 to investigate the overall comfort women agreement process and concluded that there were significant defects.
Accordingly, the government announced follow-up measures in January of the following year. While not breaking the agreement, it denied and virtually neutralized key elements such as stopping the use of the 1 billion yen fund contributed by Japan. At the same time, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said, “We will not ask the Japanese government to renegotiate” and “we took into account that the fact that it was an official agreement between the two countries is undeniable.”
The position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this day is the same. However, it was only in words, and diplomatic interpretations have come up with the fact that the government, which has been consistent with the attitude of actually breaking the agreement,’remembered’ the date of the court ruling. This is because there have been few expressions of this kind of position on the comfort women agreement.

First of all, in that the defendant in this lawsuit is not a private company or individual, but the Japanese government, the matter may be more serious than the conscript. The sensitivity that the Japanese government accepts is also inevitably different.
In particular, in this ruling, the court said, “In the 2015 comfort women agreement, the victims’ right to claim damages was not applied.” At the time of the agreement, 35 of the 47 surviving victims were already paid 100 million won through a fund raised by Japan with 1 billion yen, but the court told them to compensate again, as it was not official compensation. This is the reason why the Japanese side has an intense reaction.
It is said that the government dared to use the expression’above’ in consideration of this. It is an expression that came after fearing that the consensus on the comfort women would be completely destroyed by this ruling. The mention of “future-oriented relations between the two countries” is a result of reflecting the government’s atmosphere that preemptive management is needed in a situation where the deterioration of the relationship between Korea and Japan is apparent. The biden administration, which will be launched soon, is expected to take a three-way cooperative drive between Korea, the United States, and Japan, and concerns that it is difficult to see it as if Korea is riding a skewed line alone seems to have worked.
However, it is questionable if the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has consistently dismissed and denied the comfort women agreement since the inauguration of the Moon Jae-in administration, said it would be effective diplomatically. Although the government did not return 1 billion yen to Japan, it stopped using it, and the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation based on it was disbanded.
In this regard, an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “Please understand exactly as you wrote in the statement.”

Reporters Yoo Ji-hye and Hyun-ju Park [email protected]