South Korean Lawsuit Filed against Kim Jong Un’s Sister

After North Korea blew up an inter-Korean liaison office on its own soil last month, plunging ties with South Korea into a diplomatic nadir, a radical activist lawyer in the South determined only one person was responsible: Kim Yo Jong, the only sister of North Korea 's leader, Kim Jong Un.

So he filed a lawsuit against her.

South Korean prosecutors said they were looking into the case on Friday, but it was not clear if they would launch a formal inquiry. Their hands appeared to be tied: they had practically no means of calling her to trial to meet the charge, Reports Reuters.

The suit is largely symbolic, but if it triggers an angry reaction from the North, it could lead to the further deterioration of the relationship between the two Koreas.

The activist lawyer, Lee Kyung-jae, a vocal critic of Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, told reporters last week that he had been driven to file the lawsuit in part because Moon’s government had not been aggressive enough in dealing with the North’s destruction of the liaison office.

Inter-Korean ties were warmer in 2018 when Kim Jong Un held a summit meeting with Moon, which helped to arrange talks between Kim and President Donald Trump. Yet relations turned frosty after Kim 's second summit with Trump, conducted in Vietnam in February 2019, collapsed.

Tension mounted between the two Koreas as Kim Yo Jong became the hard-line face and voice of North Korea. After activists in the South sent anti-North Korean leaflets over the border into the North, she issued a series of statements threatening retaliation — including the destruction of the liaison office.

The North Korean military last month did blow up the office, which was in the border city of Kaesong. But her brother later suspended any further military actions aimed at scuttling the relatively warm relationship that had developed between the two Koreas in recent years.

Last week, Lee filed the lawsuit asking prosecutors to indict Kim Yo Jong, along with Pak Jong-chon, chief of the general staff of the North Korean military, on charges of destroying a building constructed with South Korean taxpayer’s money.