국제법과 국내법의 관계 - 강제동원 관련 소송에서 드러난 한국 법원의 조약 해석과 적용을 중심으로 -

In 2018, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Korea ruled in favor of the victims in a lawsuit related to forced labor during the Japanese colonial occupation. After this ruling, Korea-Japan relations rapidly deteriorated. The key issues in the 2018 ruling were how the economic cooperation fund under Article 1 of the 1965 Claims and Economic Cooperation Agreement(“the Agreement”) had any bearing with the claims under Article 2 of the Agreement, and whether the settlement of the claims included the right to claim damages on illegal acts done by the plaintiffs. The economic cooperation fund consisted of grants for purchasing Japanese products and Japanese services through international sale of goods or service contracts between Japan and Korea, and loans with an annual interest rate of 3.5%. As for the claims, their contents or scope were not clear in the context of the Agreement. As a result, the Judges’ opinions of the Supreme Court were very much divisive on the relationship between the claim for damages caused by the Japan's invasion and forcible occupation of the Korean Peninsula and the economic cooperation fund. The majority of the 2018 ruling took the textual approach, emphasizing that treaties should be interpreted according to their texts. The separate opinions and dissenting opinions, even though the textual interpretation of the treaty was tried, were not thoroughly reviewed on the relationship between grants for economic cooperation and the settlement of individual claims. Diverse legal issues caused by Japanese occupation of Korean Peninsula from 1904 to 1945 are still unresolved between Korea and Japan under the sense of international law, but the 2018 ruling by the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the sense of municipal law that the claims of victims of forced labor under Japanese occupation had not been resolved through the Agreement.