A district court in South Korea has ordered the sale of a patent held by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. for forced wartime labor compensation to a Korean woman, a lawyer for the plaintiff said Monday.
The order, dated April 29, comes on top of a similar ruling by the same court in Daejeon in the central part of the country to two other plaintiffs in September concerning a patent and trademark held by the Japanese manufacturer but seized by the court.
The district court orders were based on a South Korean Supreme Court ruling in 2018 that ordered Mitsubishi Heavy to pay damages to a group of women for their labor during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.