In this file photo dated March 1, 2023, Yang Geum-deok (second left), a South Korean victim of Japan's wartime forced labor, and former South Korean "comfort woman" Lee Yong-soo (second right), who was forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II, attend an anti-Japanese rally to mark the 104th anniversary of the March 1st Independence Movement Day against Japanese colonial rule, in Seoul. (PHOTO / AFP)

SEOUL - A South Korean appellate court on Thursday ordered the Japanese government to pay compensation to the South Korean sex slavery victims during World War II.

The Seoul High Court ruled that Tokyo should pay 200 million won ($154,000) in compensation to each of the 16 plaintiffs, including sex slavery victims and their bereaved families, overturning a lower court's ruling.

In April 2021, the lower court dismissed the damages suit filed by the plaintiffs in December 2016, citing a sovereign immunity that allows a state to be immune from a civil suit in foreign courts.

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The appellate court said that it would be reasonable under customary international law to recognize the jurisdiction of the South Korean court over the defendant Japanese government.

It noted that Japan should pay appropriate compensation to the victims given the defendant's illegal acts in the process of mobilizing the comfort women, a euphemism for the victims who were forced into sexual slavery for Imperial Japan's military brothels under the 1910-45 Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

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Historians say hundreds of thousands of Asian women, mostly from China and the Korean Peninsula, were kidnapped, coerced or duped into sexual servitude for Japanese troops before and during the Pacific War.