네덜란드의 인도네시아 식민지배 배상판결에 관한 연구 –라와게데 사건을 중심으로

Abstract

The judgment on the Rawagede case by a Dutch court in the Hague is at the intersection of law and history, which led the Dutch community to look straight into the past that they have had eschewed so long. In a broad dimension, it seems that the judgment shed more light on the dark side of the Dutch colonial rule than the Rawadege massacre itself. What made the judgment is the arrival of the Dutch new generation since 2010 who were able to have the courage of rejecting the rule of extinctive prescription. The court in the Rawagede case restricted the effects of extinctive prescription under the Dutch law. This is consonant with an international trend where international crimes including crimes against humanity are not time-barred in international criminal litigation. The Rawagede event was judged as one of the flaws in Dutch history. The victims should have been respected and compensated by the Dutch government 30 or 40 years earlier. The plaintiffs of victims died pending litigation and are aged well over 80s or sometimes 90s when the judgment was finally made in favour of them. Damages of € 20,000 were awarded to each plaintiff and followed by sincere ‘apology’ from the Dutch political leaders. It was the UN CGO that made the judgement possible. The works of the UN CGO were appreciated by the court of the Rawagede case. It is remarkable that the format envisaged by Article 3(3) of the so-called Claims Agreement between the Republic of Korea and Japan of 1965 is very similar to the way how the UN CGO was constituted.