Top Court Rules for Korean War Bereaved Family on Compensation Deadline

Bereaved families of soldiers killed in the Korean War retain the right to claim death compensation decades later if they never received official notification from the state, South Korea's top court has ruled.

The Supreme Court's First Division, with Justice Shin Sook-hee as the presiding judge, recently overturned a lower court ruling that had denied compensation to the child of a Korean War casualty and sent the case back to the Seoul High Court, legal sources said Wednesday. The plaintiff, identified as B, had sued the head of the Armed Forces Financial Management Corps to reverse a decision denying military death compensation for the plaintiff's parent, identified as A.

A enlisted in the Army in February 1949 and died on August 6, 1950, during the war. A's death was initially classified as missing, and a death report was only filed in 1963. The Army Headquarters formally designated A's death as a combat fatality in March 1998.

B filed a claim for death compensation with the government in July 2022. The Armed Forces Financial Management Corps rejected the claim, arguing that the five-year statute of limitations, counted from the date the cause for payment arose on August 6, 1950, had already expired under regulations in effect at the time of death.

The first and second instance courts sided with the government. The courts ruled that even measured from 1963, when the death report was filed, or 1998, when the Army determined A to be a combat fatality, B's 2022 claim was filed well beyond the five-year statute of limitations. The courts cited existing legal doctrine that effective ignorance of the right's existence does not constitute a legal impediment.

The Supreme Court reversed that ruling. The court held that under the Military Death Benefits Regulation revised on September 2, 1955, the starting point of the statute of limitations should be "the day the death notice is received." "The revised regulation in this case resulted from reflective consideration aimed at correcting past inequities, and should therefore apply if the statute of limitations had not yet expired at the time of revision," the court said.

"Under the extraordinary circumstances of the Korean War, bereaved families could not accurately ascertain a combat death without objective confirmation from the state through a death notice," the court said. "Running the statute of limitations uniformly from the date the cause for payment arose violates the constitutional guarantee of property rights and the principle of equity."