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In the last century, the Japanese imperialists invented illegal treaties in order to reduce Korea to their complete military colony. Among them was the “Jongmi seven-point treaty”.

They schemed to seize Korea’s right of home administration after robbing it of the diplomatic right by fabricating the “Ulsa five-point treaty” and setting up a residency-general in 1905.

Around that time, an emissary incident occurred in The Hague of the Netherlands. Emperor Kojong of the feudal Joson dynasty, who had been trying to restore the national sovereign right with the help of big powers, dispatched three emissaries including Ri Jun to the Second International Peace Conference, which was held in The Hague in 1907, to lay bare the illegality and invalidity of the “Ulsa five-point treaty” and the injustice of the Japanese imperialists’ colonial rule over Korea.

While shifting all responsibility for the incident onto Emperor Kojong, they openly forced him to abdicate. But Kojong did not give up his throne, only saying he would let the crown prince act for him.

And when they forced him to ratify the draft of the “Jongmi seven-point treaty” on July 24, he resolutely refused to give royal sanction and affix his signature and seal. Then they cooked up the treaty by affixing the seal of prime minister Ri Wan Yong and proclaimed it.

By dint of the treaty they completely deprived Korea of its legislative power, the power to appoint and dismiss government officials and the power to appoint Japanese officials. Under the treaty, the Korean feudal government became unable to employ foreigners without the consent of the resident-general.

The “Jongmi seven-point treaty” was called thus in a sense that it was cooked up in the Year of Jongmi (ram) or 1907. It was a pure fabrication completely devoid of legality and legal validity in the light of international law.

It was an illegal document which was legally invalid since it was cooked up between the resident-general who had no qualification to conclude a treaty and the Korean feudal government which had been deprived of its diplomatic right due to the “Ulsa five-point treaty”. In other words, it was nothing but an invention made by Japan, not a treaty concluded by both the Korean and Japanese sides. And it bears no sanction, signature and seal of the emperor, the sovereign of the Korean feudal government.

The Japanese imperialists, who robbed Korea of the right of home administration by fabricating the treaty, exercised all power to annex its territory and imposed colonial rule, inflicting untold misfortune and suffering on the Korean people.

During their 40-odd years of military occupation of Korea, the Japanese imperialists cooked up all kinds of draconian laws including the “national mobilization law”, abducted over 8.4 million Korean young and middle-aged people to send them to battlefields and slave labour sites and killed more than one million of them. They also reduced 200 000 Korean women to sex slaves for their army. They worked to obliterate the spoken and written language of Korea, forced the Koreans to change their names in Japanese fashion and randomly destroyed and plundered valuable cultural assets and rich natural resources of Korea.

Japan’s seizure of Korea’s sovereign right and all other unethical crimes it committed against the Korean people in the past cannot be rationalized by anything.

The Korean people will never forget its past crimes, but surely make it pay dearly for them.