Japan court holds North Korea liable for fake 'paradise on Earth' scheme

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TOKYO - A Tokyo court ordered Pyongyang on Monday to pay more than $500,000 in compensation to four individuals lured to North Korea by a fantastical propaganda scheme promising a "paradise on Earth".

More than 90,000 ethnic Koreans and their Japanese spouses are said to have migrated to North Korea between 1959 and 1984, drawn by the claims that North Korea was a paradise under a now-defunct repatriation initiative critics say amounted to state kidnapping.

Instead of finding a "paradise on Earth", victims of the scheme said in a 2018 complaint that they had been denied basic human rights and even minimum sustenance under the programme, despite assurances of free education and medicine.

They later escaped, sometimes only after decades in the North.

The years-long and highly unusual case, seeking to directly sue Pyongyang, symbolically summoned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to court, although he never showed up.

On Monday, the Tokyo District Court ruled the four plaintiffs had "most of their lives taken away" by Pyongyang, and that each deserved at least 20 million yen ($130,000) in redress.

Plaintiff Eiko Kawsaki, now 83, said she was "overwhelmed with emotion" at the verdict, having arrived in North Korea as a teenager in 1960 and spending 43 years there before she fled.

Monday's verdict was the first time "a Japanese court exercised its sovereignty against North Korea to recognise its malpractice," Atsushi Shiraki, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, told reporters, calling it "historic".

The district court initially dismissed the suit in 2022, ruling that a Japanese court did not have jurisdiction over Pyongyang's "detainment" of the plaintiffs.

But this was overturned a year later by a higher court, which sent the case back to the district court for review.

Kanae Doi, Japan director of Human Rights Watch, hailed the ruling as "one very important, successful example of attempts to hold North Korea accountable" for its international crimes.

Under the programme, those suspected of disloyalty "faced severe punishment, including imprisonment with forced labour or as political prisoners", according to HRW.

However, Kawasaki acknowledged that enforcing payment would be next to impossible.

"I'm sure the North Korean government will just ignore the court order," she said.

Kenji Fukuda, chief lawyer for the case, said the most realistic option to retrieve the money was to confiscate North Korean assets and property in Japan.

The "paradise on Earth" programme was backed by the then Japanese government, with the media touting it as a humanitarian campaign for Koreans struggling to build a life in Japan.

During Tokyo's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, millions of Koreans moved to Japan, either voluntarily or against their will.

When Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands remained, reluctant to return to their devastated homeland.