In his Liberation Day speech, President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea pointed out that he would like to improve Korea-Japan relations towards a common future. However, a thorn in the relation between Japan and South Korea has been the unresolved issue of the so-called comfort women who had been forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese army between 1932 to 1945. The case of the comfort women raises many legal questions. On December 28, 2015, the Japanese and Korean government reached an agreement that aims to resolve the decades-old problem. The so-called 2015 Agreement gave new impetus to the debate over the legal responsibility of the Japanese government under international law. The most relevant issues and subsequent legal developments will be discussed in the following article.

On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration killed General Quassem Soleimani by a drone strike. Soleimani had been widely considered the second most powerful leader in Iran. President Trump and his administration have provided different justifications for the drone attack. The assassination of Quassem Soleimani has been met with criticism in many parts of the world. Legal scholars have extensively debated the lawfulness of the drone strike. They discussed, inter alia, whether the killing of the Iranian general was a violation of international law regulating the use of force (jus ad bellum), international humanitarian law (jus in bello) and international human rights law. The following article examines the legality of the killing of the Iranian general, from the jus ad bellum by focusing on the accumulation of events theory. Furthermore, the article addresses the policy implications that the killing of Soleimani might have on other countries such as North Korea.

Cyber attacks have become a grave threat to international peace and security. Northeast Asia is a critical point of many of these cyber operations. First, South Korea has been the target of cyber attacks from North Korea. Second, there are harsh debates on this matter between the US and China. While the United States have expressed their concerns about the growing threat of cyber intrusions from China, the People’s Republic of China has blamed the US for attacks against their respective computer networks. From the perspective of the jus ad bellum, potential cyber attacks raise a number of difficult and complex issues. The following article examines which cyber operations amount to the use of force as stipulated in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and discusses the conditions under which type of cyber attacks could trigger the right to self-defense. In addition, other available remedies outside the framework of Article 51 of the UN Charter will be discussed.