High Court Rejects Korean School Petition for Tuition Waiver

September 28, 2018

Osaka- Overturning a lower court ruling, a Japanese high court rejected on Thursday a petition for canceling a government decision to exclude a pro-Pyongyang Korean high school in Osaka Prefecture, western Japan, from its tuition-free program for high schools.

The government's decision "cannot be regarded as illegal," Osaka High Court Presiding Judge Yuzuru Takahashi said, turning down the claim by the operator of the Korean high school in Higashiosaka.

The latest ruling was the first judgment made by a high court on a series of similar lawsuits filed in five locations across Japan.

Similar claims were rejected by district courts in Hiroshima, western Japan, Tokyo, and Nagoya, central Japan. The Kokura branch of Fukuoka District Court, southwestern Japan, is slated to issue its ruling on a similar case in March next year.

The law on the tuition waiver program took effect in fiscal 2010 under the administration of the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan. After a change of government, the then education minister in February 2013 excluded Korean schools in Japan from the program.

In Thursday's ruling, the presiding judge said, "The government decision to omit Korean schools from the tuition waiver program cannot be judged to be unreasonable."

He also said it cannot be said that the education minister abused his discretionary power in making the exclusion decision.

On the Korean school's links to the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, the judge said there is reasonable suspicion that the school receives excessive intervention by Chongryon and is under its control in a way that distorts the autonomy of education.

"It cannot be said that the school is in compliance (with a legal provision on the tuition-free program), from the standpoint of appropriate school management based on laws and regulations," he said.

In the lawsuit filed in Osaka, the Korean school side claimed that the tuition-free program should cover all high schools and that the education minister did not have the authority to select schools eligible for the program.

In its ruling issued in July 2017, Osaka District Court ordered the government to withdraw its exclusion decision and cover the Korean high school in Higashiosaka by its tuition-free program.

The district court said that the government illegally excluded the Korean school on the basis of the diplomatic and political reason that including it in the assistance program would not win public support amid no progress on the decades-old issue of abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korea. Jiji Press