Koreas to hold first arbitration body meeting at Kaesong park

A joint panel on arbitration at an inter-Korean factory park in North Korea plans to hold its first meeting this week to discuss detailed rules of operation, an official here said Tuesday. The planned meeting of the Commercial Arbitration Committee of the Kaesong Industrial Complex is scheduled to take place Thursday in the namesake border city, according to an official of South Korea's Ministry of Unification. Back in 2000, the two countries adopted an agreement on arbitrating possible legal disputes at the industrial park. They then agreed last year to set up the panel and exchanged lists of five board members from each side. "This week's meeting is expected to be a starting point for the two Koreas to come up with useful tools on how to operate the committee so as to effectively settle diverse legal disputes, much like a court," the ministry official said. South and North Korea will appoint 30 mediators each, and some of them will form a judging panel to deal with individual cases, he added. The committee meeting is the latest in a series of inter-Korean efforts to further boost the factory zone home to 123 small South Korean companies that employ around 52,000 North Korean employees. As the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean economic cooperation, the Kaesong complex has served as a major revenue source for the cash-strapped communist country.