Seoul: An appeals court has ruled in favor of a 107-year-old South Korean victim of Japan's wartime forced labor in a damages suit filed against Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., sources said Saturday.

According to Yonhap News Agency, the civil appeals division of the Seoul Central District Court overturned a lower court's ruling from 2022. This prior decision had rejected Kim Han-soo's suit seeking compensation from the Japanese company on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.

In May, the appeals court ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to pay 100 million won (US$73,400) in compensation to Kim. This ruling comes nearly 80 years after Kim was conscripted into Japan's wartime forced labor.

Despite the court's decision, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is not likely to pay the compensation. Kim recounted being forced to work in a shipyard run by the Japanese firm in 1944, during Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

In previous damages suits related to forced labor, courts largely ruled that the statute of limitations expired in May 2015. This was three years after the Supreme Court acknowledged the legal right to claim damages by Korean victims of Japan's forced labor for the first time.

South Korean civil law stipulates that the legal right to claim damages expires three years after the victim discovers the harm and identifies the offender. However, the appeals court ruled in favor of Kim, determining that the statute of limitations for forced labor-related damages suits should be calculated based on a separate 2018 ruling by the Supreme Court. This effectively pushed back the expiration of the statute of limitations. Kim's damages suit against Mitsubishi was filed in 2019.

In 2018, the Supreme Court ordered Japanese firms to compensate Korean victims of Tokyo's forced labor in a landmark ruling. However, Japan has maintained that all such reparation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty to normalize bilateral relations.