Japan’s ambassador to South Korea returned to Tokyo on Monday, reiterating its frustration over a statue of a « comfort woman » which has reignited a diplomatic row over Tokyo’s wartime sex slavery.
Tensions spiked on Friday when Tokyo said it would recall its envoy over the statue which was placed outside its consulate in Busan last month, symbolising women forced to work in Japanese military brothels mostly during World War II.
Japan argues it is against a 2015 agreement between the neighbours meant to put an end to the hugely emotional and decades-long « comfort women » issue with a Japanese apology and payment of money.
« It is extremely regrettable that the girl statue was set, » ambassador Yasumasa Nagamine told reporters ahead of his departure from Seoul Monday morning, adding that he would discuss the issue with government officials, possibly including Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida.
The plight of the women has marred relations for decades but the two governments reached an agreement in late 2015 to finally resolve it.
Under that accord, which both countries described as « final and irreversible, » Japan offered an apology and a one-billion yen ($8.6 billion) payment to surviving Korean comfort women.
Critics of the accord say the deal did not go far enough in holding Japan responsible for wartime abuses during its 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula.
Mainstream historians say up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea but also other parts of Asia including China, were forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War II.
The statue in Busan was initially removed by local authorities but after the Japanese defence minister paid homage at Yasukuni Shrine last month — a spot where senior convicted war criminals are honoured — Seoul allowed activists to put the statue back up.

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Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy…
Daniel Hannan, as I’ve noted in the past, has an awkward habit of deleting his tweets. Often, by a strange coincidence, it’s the more embarrassing proclamations that vanish into the ether – no explanation, no, “Apologies, friends, I buggered that up didn’t I?” The tweet simply vanishes as if it had never been tweeted.
I’ve taken, then, to screenshot-ing some of the best morsels, just in case they’re not there the next time I look. Here’s one now:
Funny thing about that tweet is that Danny Boy has not, at time of writing, deleted it. Despite the fact he was tricked into embarrassing himself by a mean-spirited Remoaner, it’s still sitting there on the internet looking for all the world like its author is not crippled with embarrassment at the fact he could have been such a dunderhead as to write it. Two things are wrong with it, one relatively small, the other so huge as to be all encompassing.
The small one lies in the choice of monarchs. Not all of them are unreasonable: Henry VIII famously broke with the Catholic Church in his search for a divorce, an heir, and a quick bonk with Anne Boleyn. Since that meant an end to the period in which the English crown was answerable to a higher authority in the form of the Pope, we’ve already been treated to umpteen “Britain’s first Brexit” articles, and they’re not soon likely to stop – all this, despite the fact the big man liked to go around telling people he was also the King of France.
Similarly England spent much of the reign of his daughter trying to avoid being swallowed by the Spanish Empire, so it’s probably fair to suggest that Elizabeth I wasn’t a big fan of European integration either. George V, though, was closely related to – indeed, shared a face with – half the other head of states in Europe during his time on the planet, so what he’s doing there is anybody’s guess.
The truly vexing inclusion, though, is Edward V. Is Daniel Hannan really saying that a boy king who reigned for 79 days and was murdered by a wicked uncle at the age of 12 had serious concerns about the European project? Was it the damage that the Combined Agricultural Policy wrought on developing world farmers that Edward was brooding about in his tower? The money wasted on repeatedly moving the European Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg? What?
@JonnElledge To be fair, if you’d ask the Princes in the Tower if they wanted to leave or remain, I’d bet they’d vote leave.
— Chris Cook (@xtophercook) December 29, 2016
Okay let’s be charitable and assume it’s a typo, presumably for another of Henry’s kids Edward VI. (It certainly wasn’t Edward III who spent much of his reign trying to get into Europe, by kicking off an endless war with France.) But the bigger problem here lies not in the specifics of Daniel’s answer, but in the fact he bothered to answer at all. The entire exercise is entirely ludicrous. It’s like asking for Theresa May’s position on the dissolution of the monasteries, or Jeremy Hunt’s proposals for tackling the Black Death.
The question is an ahistorical nonsense – not just because the European Union was invented in the late 20th century to deal with problems specific to a particular time, but because it misunderstands how England’s role in Europe has evolved over the centuries.
For the first five hundred years or so after the Conquest, the nations of the British Isles were a key part of a western European political system that included France and the Low countries. Until it lost Calais in 1558, indeed, the English Crown generally held territory in France.
The idea that the United Kingdom, as the state became, was with Europe but not of it – that its destiny lay on the high seas, not the continent – is a notion that’s core to Eurosceptic mythology, but one which didn’t emerge until the imperial era. Exactly when I’m not sure (unlike certain Conservative MEPs I’m not afraid to admit my ignorance, which is what makes us better than the animals and egg avatars). However you count it, though, the period between then and 1973 must make up a minority of England’s history as a nation. For most of its history, the idea that the England was somehow not properly “European” would have seemed crazy.
Actually, there was one major European project which a king of both England and Scotland kept us out of, a policy decision confirmed by his successors. That project was a key plank of French foreign policy, grew to encompass more far flung countries like Sweden, and was launched largely to prevent the Germans from getting above themselves. It was the Thirty Years War.
But is James I & VI on Hannan’s list? Is he b*llocks.
It has been widely reported that my case – R (Miller) versus The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union – is a Brexit case but this misrepresentation misses the fundamental constitutional issues that it seeks to defend.
The most fundamental rule of the United Kingdom’s constitution is that parliament is sovereign. Today this translates to the constitutional cornerstone that the government of the day, acting as agents for the Crown, cannot by exercise of prerogative powers, override legislation enacted by parliament.
Set within the context of rising populism, I believe the defence of a proper legal process is an important point for this year’s intake of politics students to consider. This is what I fervently believe in and why I took my case to court. To understand the constitutional issue at stake, it is important to look at the political and legal background. On the 23rd June 2016, the country voted to leave the EU.
The mechanism for any member state to withdraw from the EU is Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The formal withdrawal process is initiated by a notification from the UK to the European Council. The EU and the UK will then have a two-year time-frame to agree on a withdrawal package.
After that, membership ends automatically, unless the European Council and the UK agree jointly to extend the period. However, a major weakness of Article 50 is that it is not substantive in its content or conditions, and only concerns itself with procedural requirements.
Article 50 (1) states: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The government indicated they intended to bypass parliament and trigger Article 50 using a Crown prerogative power.
The question raised by our case was whether a government minister, the executive, could trigger the process of withdrawing the UK from the EU without being authorised to do so by an Act of Parliament.
Our case argued that once Article 50 is triggered, the legal consequence of the UK withdrawing would inevitably lead to citizens’ rights being diminished or removed, not least the four freedoms of the free movement of goods, people, services and capital over borders, could cease, depending on the exit package negotiated by the UK government.
My legal team and I believed that as a representative parliamentary democracy, our constitutional requirement is that only parliament can grant rights, and only parliament can take them away.
As no-one appeared to be certain in respect of the fundamental constitutional question about where power lies, and this was the issue my legal team and I were asking the courts to resolve. We were not arguing that the result of the referendum was itself a “decision” that the UK should withdraw from the EU, which would satisfy “constitutional requirements”.
Nor were we suggesting that the judiciary can or should decide whether the UK should withdraw from the EU. The contested issue was whether the government, using prerogative powers, had constitutional authority to make that decision without parliament.
The residual Crown prerogative power that exists on the international plain was about to be used on the domestic plain, which would not just undermine parliamentary sovereignty, it would also set a dangerous new precedent.
Our challenge fully accepted that notification itself is likely to be a matter for the executive, acting on parliamentary authority conferred by statute, and having regard to the terms of parliament’s decision. The court was not being asked to interfere with parliamentary procedure.
The question for the court was whether a parliamentary decision, in the form of primary legislation, is constitutionally necessary before a minister can trigger the process of withdrawing the UK from the EU by notifying the European Council pursuant to Article 50(2).
Our submission was that the royal or Crown prerogative is a residual power reserved for the conduct of international relations, and the making and unmaking of treaties. In other words, prerogative powers end where domestic law begins. Consequently, the executive does not have prerogative power to “decide” that the UK should withdraw from the EU; nor can any ministers lawfully “notify” the European Council of any such decision without parliament’s statutory authority to do so.
If the court was to rule in the government’s favour, we would be beginning a new, I believe, autocratic phase in our country where a constitutional legal precedent would have been established that any executive of any government could bypass parliament, sit behind closed doors and decide which rights ordinary citizens keep or lose.
In terms of the effects of leaving the EU, the short-term reality is that the Conservative government would take on all EU law and rights, in acquis, and have the power to decide amongst themselves which to strip away and which we keep. A constitutional precedent set by a government taking such drastic action without consulting parliament is an even larger political issue for our country, than whether Britain leaves the EU.
As we enter an age of populism, political challenges clearly arise for our society. The danger is that the baby is thrown out with the bath water. Fundamental principles of our constitution, such as the rule of law, the separation of powers between the government, the peoples’ representatives in parliament and the independent judiciary provide the very framework within which populism can express itself and indeed flourish. But populism is not anarchy, and whilst it is easy to see why many wish to kick against the system, it is less clear what changes for the better are being proposed to that system.
The solutions will inevitably be political ones. One key aspect of my Article 50 litigation is that so few people have a clear understanding of what our constitutional arrangements are.
For students of politics (and politicians) the lesson is clear; politics does not exist in a vacuum, and it is our constitution which is the glue that keeps our society together, even when populists may wish to change the nature of that same society.
This article originally appeared in the New Statesman’s Political Studies Guide for 2017 .

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