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

The Seoul Central District Court ruled on 16 September that North Korea must pay the South Korean government 44,626,410,722 won, about $32.5 million, for blowing up the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong in June 2020. The court granted the full sum sought by the Unification Ministry and ordered the North to bear the litigation costs. It did not publish detailed reasons.

The ministry filed the case in June 2023. Officials described it as the first time the South Korean state had sued North Korea for damages. The claim split the loss in two: 10.25 billion won for the liaison office building and 34.45 billion won for an adjacent inter-Korean economic cooperation support centre that the blast wrecked and left unusable.

The office opened in September 2018 in the idle Kaesong Industrial Complex, days before then-president Moon Jae-in travelled to Pyongyang for his third summit with Kim Jong Un. About 20 officials from each side worked there as a round-the-clock channel under the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration. Operations stopped in January 2020 over Covid-19. In June that year, after activists in the South floated balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border, the North called the office useless and demolished it.

South Korea has no practical way to collect. North Korea keeps no known commercial assets in the South that a Seoul court can attach. The Unification Ministry said it respects the ruling and will review follow-up measures. It also said it hopes inter-Korean dialogue resumes and that the two Koreas can settle pending issues through talks. North Korea's embassy in Beijing did not immediately comment.

A judgment without a defendant in the room

Pyongyang does not recognise South Korean courts. It did not send counsel. The case ran for three years and three months as a one-sided proceeding. That is why the order reads like an accounting exercise: a building value, a support-centre value, a total. The legal point the ministry wanted on paper is that the demolition was a wrongful act against South Korean property, even though the land sits north of the Military Demarcation Line.

The lawsuit began under Yoon Suk-yeol, who took a hard line toward the North before he was removed after a martial-law episode. The present government inherited the file. Keeping the case alive, then welcoming a money judgment it cannot enforce, is a way to record the destruction without reopening the industrial complex or the liaison channel.

Kaesong once employed North Korean workers in South Korean-run factories. That experiment ended years before the office was blown up. The liaison building was the last standing symbol of the 2018 thaw on that site. Its wreckage is still there. The judgment assigns a won figure to that wreckage and stops.

What the number does and does not change

Forty-four point six billion won will not rebuild a channel that both sides have left closed. It will not move the North to pay. It may appear in future South Korean talking points when officials list uncompensated acts: the office, the support centre, the factories frozen in Kaesong. It may also be cited if Seoul ever finds a North Korean asset in a third country that a court there will treat as reachable.

For now the ruling is a first. A South Korean district court has named the North Korean state as a judgment debtor. The debtor will ignore the docket. The creditor says it wants talks. The building in Kaesong remains a hole in the ground with a price attached.