South Korean court finds former lawmaker guilty of misusing funds meant for sexual slavery victims

Activist Yoon Meehyang, center left, marches toward the Japanese Embassy during a funeral ceremony of Kim Bok-dong, a former South Korean sex slave, in Seoul, South Korea, on Feb. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)

Content warning: This story contains mention of sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised. 

SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea’s Supreme Court on Thursday handed a suspended prison sentence to a former lawmaker who was found guilty of embezzling funds while leading a group supporting Korean survivors of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery.

Yoon Meehyang, who was also convicted of fraudulently receiving government subsidies and unlawfully collecting donations, didn’t attend the verdict, which confirmed a lower court’s sentence of a year and six months in prison, suspended for three years.

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In a statement on Facebook, Yoon described her conviction as “unjust,” saying she and her colleagues handled the group’s funds properly and “had not pursued private interests.”

Yoon’s group, the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, said it plans to return the government subsidies linked to the fraud charges but criticized the court for failing to see the “substantive truth.”

“Despite our efforts over the past four years, we failed to achieve a ‘not guilty’ result with the Supreme Court, but I want to use this opportunity to say once again — my colleagues and I are innocent,” Yoon wrote.

Controversy surrounding Yoon and her group erupted in 2020 when one of the slavery victims, Lee Yong-soo, accused her of misusing donations and other funds and spending little on the victims.

Yoon, who had just begun her term as a lawmaker for the liberal opposition Democratic Party, denied allegations that she and the group used the funds for private gain and insisted that Lee’s claim was based on a misunderstanding.

Historians say tens of thousands of women from around Asia, many of them Korean, were sent to front-line military brothels to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers. Hundreds were registered with the South Korean government as victims but only eight of them are still alive.

Prosecutors indicted Yoon in September 2020 over embezzlement, fraud and other charges, months before the Democratic Party expelled her over separate suspicions of inappropriate real-estate investments. She finished her four-year term as a legislator last year as an independent.

The Supreme Court upheld a verdict by the Seoul High Court in September last year, which found Yoon guilty of fraudulently obtaining 65.2 million won (US$46,300) in government subsidies from 2014 to 2020 by falsely reporting labor costs, and of embezzling 79 million won (US$56,150) of the group’s funds.

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The court also ruled that Yoon violated laws by collecting donations through unregistered accounts as the group organized the funeral of Kim Bok-dong, a sexual slavery victim and activist who died in 2019.

The issues of sexual slavery, forced labor and other abuses during Japan’s brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before the end of the Second World War have long been a source of tensions between Seoul and Tokyo.