Seoul court orders North Korea to pay 44.6 billion won for blowing up the Kaesong liaison office

The Seoul Central District Court ruled on 16 September that North Korea must pay 44,626,410,722 won, about $32.5 million, to the South Korean government for destroying the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong on 16 June 2020. The sum is the full amount the Unification Ministry claimed when it filed suit in June 2023. The court also ordered the North to pay litigation costs. No North Korean representative took part in the case. The court did not publish a detailed statement of reasons with the order.

The ministry split the claim into two parts: 10.25 billion won for the liaison building itself and 34.45 billion won for an adjoining support facility that the blast wrecked. Both structures stood in the Kaesong Industrial Region, the old joint factory zone where South Korean firms once employed North Korean workers. The four-storey liaison office had opened in September 2018, days before then President Moon Jae-in flew to Pyongyang for his third summit with Kim Jong Un. About 20 officials from each side worked there until January 2020, when the pandemic shut the site.

Pyongyang dynamited the building after activists in the South sent balloons carrying anti-North leaflets across the border. North Korean statements at the time called the office useless. The demolition was filmed and released. It closed the last standing physical channel created by the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration.

The lawsuit was the first time the South Korean state sued the North Korean state for money. It was filed under Yoon Suk Yeol, whose government took a harder line on Pyongyang before Yoon left office after his martial law crisis. The court’s order now lands on a different administration. The Unification Ministry said it respected the ruling and would study follow-up steps. It also said it hoped problems with the North could still be handled through dialogue.

Collection is another matter. North Korea has no attachable assets in Seoul that officials have identified for this judgment. Its embassy in Beijing did not comment. A damages order that cannot be executed still has uses. It fixes an official South Korean valuation of the destroyed compound. It creates a legal fact that future negotiators can put on a table or ignore. It tells North Korean defector groups and South Korean conservatives that the state went to court rather than treat the blast as only a political insult.

The office was never an embassy. The two Koreas do not recognise each other as foreign states in the ordinary sense. It was a communications post with a flag on each side of the lobby. Its destruction was a message about leaflets and about Moon’s settlement. The judgment six years later is a message of a different kind: that Seoul will use its own civil courts against Pyongyang even when the defendant will not walk in and will not pay. Whether that habit spreads to other inter-Korean claims is the open question the ministry now has to answer in its follow-up review.