Japanese court orders Pyongyang to pay damages to survivors of deceptive repatriation program

A Japanese court on Monday held North Korea responsible for the human rights violations of four plaintiffs lured to the North by Pyongyang's postwar false promise of living in “paradise on Earth,” ordering its government to pay them 22 million yen ($143,000) each, a decision welcomed by the survivors and their supporters as groundbreaking. The Tokyo District Court ruled that the plaintiffs, both ethnic Koreans and Japanese, were forced into decades of harsh conditions without freedom to return home after moving to North Korea with tens of thousands of others under a 1959-1984 repatriation program, in which the North gave them false promises of free health care, education, jobs and other benefits. In a 2022 ruling, the court acknowledged that the plaintiffs moved to North Korea because of false information given by the North and a pro-North organization in Japan called Chongryon, but rejected their compensation claims on grounds of a lack of Japanese jurisdiction and expiration of the statute of limitations.