Via a reader tip comes news that ROK government held a meeting with USFK to address changes they want made to the US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA):
Yeo Seung-bae (R), director-general for North American affairs at the South Korean foreign ministry, shakes hands with Deputy Commander of U.S. Forces Korea Thomas Bergeson in Seoul on Nov. 22, 2016, before a joint committee meeting on a bilateral agreement governing the legal status of American forces here, known as the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), to discuss a range of pending issues. (Yonhap)
South Korea and the United States on Tuesday had a joint committee meeting to discuss various issues on their agreement governing the legal status of American forces stationed in South Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday.
The 197th joint committee meeting of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which defines areas of legal responsibility of the 28,000-strong U.S. soldiers here, was held at the foreign ministry in Seoul. The SOFA meeting is held once or twice a year, and this was the first time since last December that South Korea and the U.S. officials convened.
The foreign ministry said Yeo Seung-bae, the foreign ministry’s director-general for North America and his counterpart Thomas Bergeson, deputy commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), touched on issues such as education of American forces on local law and customs, the USFK’s stable employment of South Korean workers and environmental problems near the U.S. bases here.
The ministry added that the two sides also talked about implementation measures taken after a live anthrax sample from a U.S. military laboratory was shipped to a local military base by mistake and caused alarm bells to go off in the country last year.
The meeting took place before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump — one of whose campaign pledges was to have allies, including South Korea, pay more for American troops stationed in those countries — took over the White House. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but the ROKs are still complaining about the oil leak issue in the Seoul subway system they have been blaming on Yongsan Garrison for years now. You would think if the oil leak was coming from Yongsan they would have found it by now. The other thing in the article that caught my attention was that they are still complaining about GI crimes. The article even states that the US military crime rate has steadily dropped since 2010 from an already extremely low crime rate compared to the surrounding Korean population.
You can read more about the US-ROK SOFA at the below link:
