The Hiroshima District Court on Thursday rejected a lawsuit filed by three Japanese A-bomb survivors who live in Brazil and were seeking unpaid medical allowances from the Hiroshima Prefectural Government.
Presiding Judge Yoshinari Hashimoto said the five-year statute of limitations on the survivors' right to claim their unpaid allowances had run out. He told them that they could no longer demand the roughly 2.9 million yen they were seeking in their lawsuit.
The judge said the prefectural government "only refused to pay the allowances to atomic bomb victims living overseas based on the central government's legal interpretation, and did not block the plaintiffs from taking legal action" on the matter.