S. Korea court orders Nippon Steel to compensate forced-labor family

Steel News  |  2026-08-13 05:18:19   |   By

Under South Korean civil law, compensation claims generally expire three years after a plaintiff becomes aware of an unlawful act and the responsible party or 10 years after the act occurred.

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): South Korea's Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a ruling ordering Japan's Nippon Steel to pay 80 million won ($56,500) to the family of a Korean man who was subjected to forced labor during Japan's colonial rule of Korea.

The Supreme Court's second division, led in the case by Justice Oh Kyeong-mi, rejected the company's appeal and affirmed a lower court decision partially in favor of five surviving family members.

The plaintiffs included a child of the late Min Moon-sik, who was forcibly mobilized in 1942 to work at the Kamaishi steelworks in Iwate Prefecture, Japan.

Min escaped from the facility and returned to Korea after the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945.

His children and other relatives sued Nippon Steel, formerly known as Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal and linked to the wartime operator of the facility, arguing that the forced mobilization deprived them of the protection and financial support of a family member and caused physical and emotional suffering.

The central legal issue was whether the statute of limitations for their claims had expired.

Under South Korean civil law, compensation claims generally expire three years after a plaintiff becomes aware of an unlawful act and the responsible party or 10 years after the act occurred.

Courts, however, may recognize circumstances that objectively prevented plaintiffs from exercising their rights and calculate the limitation period from the point when that obstacle was removed.

A lower court initially dismissed the family's claim after using a 2012 Supreme Court ruling as the starting point for calculating the limitation period.

An appeals court reached a different conclusion.

It determined that Oct. 30, 2018 - when the Supreme Court issued an en banc ruling formally recognizing individual compensation claims by victims of forced labor - should be treated as the point from which the statute of limitations began to run.

The appeals court therefore ordered Nippon Steel to pay the family 80 million won.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday affirmed that reasoning.

The lower appeals court had concluded that only after the landmark 2018 ruling did the possibility of obtaining judicial relief for forced-labor victims in South Korea become sufficiently clear.

The court said the plaintiffs, as heirs of the victim, had faced an objective obstacle preventing them from exercising their rights until the 2018 decision.

Nippon Steel has faced a series of lawsuits in South Korea stemming from Koreans' wartime forced labor. The company has previously disclosed that South Korea's Supreme Court has rejected several of its appeals in related cases.

Courtesy: www.upi.com