A group of 117 South Korean Hansen's disease sufferers on Wednesday appealed a district court ruling handed down the day before that rejected their demand for the Japanese government to compensate them because they had been segregated into a sanitarium during the Japanese colonization of the Korea Peninsula, their lawyers said.
The move came after two panels of judges at the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday handed down conflicting rulings in two similar damages suits. One panel ruled against the suit filed by the South Koreans, but the other ruled in favor of a suit brought by 25 Taiwanese Hansen's disease sufferers.
They filed the suits last year after the Japanese government rejected their compensation requests in line with the Hansen Disease compensation law, which was enforced in 2001.
The law does not clearly say if it covers sufferers isolated at sanitariums in regions that were once under Japanese colonial rule, allowing the two panels to issue different rulings, experts pointed out.
That was why the rulings given Tuesday totally depended on how the two presiding judges interpreted the law, said sociologist Yasunori Fukuoka at Saitama University.
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