Court Awards $400M Default Judgment Against North Korea to Victims of 1968 Attack on U.S.S. Pueblo

A short excerpt from the long opinion in Does v. Democratic People’s Republic of N. Korea, decided yesterday by Judge Timothy Kelly (D.D.C.):

In January 1968, North Korea chased down and captured the U.S.S. Pueblo in international waters, killing one of the ship’s crew and taking the rest hostage. For the next eleven months, North Korea beat, starved, interrogated, and tortured the survivors to extract false confessions from them. Before the year was up, North Korea got the admission and the apology that it wanted from the United States for supposedly violating North Korean territorial waters. And the hostages, having served their purpose, were released.

This case is the latest of several in which some of the Pueblo’s crew members, their families, and their estates sued North Korea under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and state tort law. North Korea failed to appear, and Plaintiffs moved for default judgment. For the reasons below, the Court will grant their motion and award long-overdue compensation to these victims of state-sponsored terrorism.

As to the statute of limitations, the opinion says this:

The FSIA’s statute of limitations imposes a cut-off date for lawsuits: the later of (1) 10 years after April 24, 1996, and 10 years after “the cause of action arose.” This timing provision is not jurisdictional, so it does not implicate the Court’s power to decide the case. And “by defaulting” and failing to “raise [this] affirmative defense in responding to a pleading,” North Korea has forfeited this timing-based defense. Moreover, district courts lack “authority to raise sua sponte the FSIA terrorism exception’s statute of limitations when it has been forfeited by a defendant” like North Korea “who is entirely absent from the proceedings.” So even though Plaintiffs’ complaint, filed in January 2023, might struggle to overcome the FSIA’s statute of limitations were the issue raised, the issue has not been raised, and the Court will not—cannot—address it unprompted.

The awards, which amount to $404.55M, are listed in this order; I don’t know whether there are any North Korean assets that plaintiffs could access to collect on the awards.