“How can South Korea’s law be this weak? Twenty-three people died!”Those were the words of Chinese mother Li Shun-ji after South Korea’s Supreme Court upheld a reduced four-year prison sentence for Aricell CEO Park Soon-kwan last Tuesday over a 2024 factory fire that killed 23 workers, including Li’s then-24-year-old daughter, Yan Jing-jing.

The blaze at the lithium battery manufacturer’s factory in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi province, killed 17 Chinese nationals, one Laotian national and five South Koreans, and injured nine others. About 35,000 lithium batteries reportedly exploded in a chain reaction, with defective products and rushed operations to meet military supply deadlines contributing to the disaster.

“Are you making this decision because we are foreigners?”Li, 56, said through tears after the ruling.

Under South Korea’s Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA), introduced in 2022 to strengthen corporate accountability for fatal workplace accidents, Aricell was found to have sent 53 unskilled workers to work on the batteries, neglected safety training and failed to secure evacuation routes.

Last year, a district court sentenced Park and his son, the factory’s managing director, to 15 years in prison each, the harshest sentences ever handed down to company executives under the law.

The appeal court later cleared both men of a key charge related to the failure to install an emergency exit on the factory’s second floor and reduced the jail term to four years for Park and seven years for his son. The Supreme Court also upheld the jail sentence for Park’s son.

Aricell was also fined 800 million won (US$604,000).

In its ruling, the appeal court said safety regulations did not require exits on every floor and were applicable on a building-by-building basis. It also considered Aricell’s settlements with bereaved families.

The Supreme Court’s judgment has drawn criticism from the victims’ relatives and labour activists, who say it reflects a judicial system that is too lenient towards corporations for offences committed by them.

“When the court ruling ended in just 10 seconds, my heart started pounding so hard that my mind went completely blank,” Li said, referring to the time between the court convening and announcing its verdict.

“I kept asking the person next to me, ‘Is this real? Is this really happening?’”Yan had worked at Aricell for only two months. She had studied to become a teacher in China but left everything behind in the summer of 2024 to join her family, who were planning to apply for permanent residency in South Korea. She took a job at the factory to help support them and received a pay rise after just two months.

“She was happily telling me that her managers seemed to have a good impression of her,” Li said. “But not long afterwards, the accident happened.”Li arrived in South Korea in 2002 and later opened a Chinese restaurant in Siheung with her husband, but after the pandemic forced its closure, she joined an insurance company and he returned to factory work.

The ruling has prompted criticism from civic groups, including the National Council of Churches in Korea, while legislators have highlighted shortcomings in government workplace inspections. Li has also faced online abuse, including comments telling her family to return to China.

“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t want to continue living here,” she said. “After living here for more than 20 years, I have only just realised how much discrimination there is against foreigners like us.”More than 70 per cent of South Koreans in their twenties and thirties held unfavourable views of China, according to a survey by the Seoul-based think tank East Asia Institute released last year.

Li, however, has decided to stay in South Korea for her 17-year-old younger daughter, who arrived as a toddler and speaks only Korean. She attends high school in Siheung.

“After seeing how worried she was about me, I decided I couldn’t go on living like a dead person,” Li said, recalling the two years of her anguish following Yan’s death. “I started going out into the streets to protest and fight for justice.”South Korea has reported a series of deadly industrial accidents in recent months.

In June, five people died in an explosion at Hanwha Aerospace’s factory in Daejeon. A special inspection by the Ministry of Employment and Labour found 473 violations, 189 of which were referred for legal action.

In March, 14 people died in a fire at an auto parts factory operated by Anjeon Industrial, also in Daejeon. The company’s CEO was among 13 people referred to prosecutors on charges including professional negligence resulting in death and injury.

Workplace deaths have declined in South Korea, but fatalities in manufacturing have risen. The labour ministry recorded 366 deaths in accidents at the workplace subject to official investigation between January and September, down 20 per cent from 457 in the same period last year, while manufacturing deaths increased to 132 from 119.

Jeon Soo-kyong, a coordinator at the labour rights group Solidarity for Worker’s Health, said unsafe conditions disproportionately affected workers in vulnerable employment positions.

“Many of the workers dying in industrial accidents in South Korea today are migrant workers, as in the Aricell case, or Korean workers on non-regular contracts,” she said.

“There are subtle forms of discrimination in the workplace. A non-regular worker may be left to work alone without adequate safety measures, while a permanent employee has a colleague to help with the same task.”Jeon said such practices reflected entrenched management cultures that prioritised cost-cutting. She also pointed to South Korea’s history of treating labour activism as a threat during its rapid industrialisation in past decades.

“Campaigns by workers to address industrial accidents have also been stigmatised by society, particularly by the prosecution and the government,” she said.

Cases under the SAPA labour safety law have led to greater scrutiny of corporate accountability in recent years.

In 2022, a district court acquitted Sampyo Group and its chairman after three workers died in a landslide at a quarry operated by Sampyo Industry in Yangju, prompting outrage among South Koreans over the verdict.

Choi Cheong-hak, a law professor at the Korea National Open University, attributed the hesitancy to impose severe punishments on companies or business executives to “a widely shared belief that these people play an important role in society”.

He noted that despite SAPA’s wide implementation in the country, the regulation still needed more teeth: of the 167 first-instance verdicts handed down, only three corporate executives received final prison sentences. “This is an extremely small rate.”

Shin Ha-na, the lawyer representing Aricell’s bereaved families, said she would challenge Tuesday’s ruling, arguing that it effectively gave the company a free pass.

“Labour safety laws are not being properly enforced in practice, and rulings like this narrow what those laws are meant to achieve,” she said. “Our priority is to ensure that existing laws are properly implemented and enforced.”Her team is preparing to file a complaint over the ruling with the Constitutional Court within the 30-day deadline. For Li, the fight is not over as she is seeking to recover her daughter’s remains.

Of the 23 people killed in the fire, only one body was found to be intact. The bereaved families hope to hold a joint funeral once the remaining remains have been recovered. Hwaseong city officials have discussed plans for a memorial park.

“All the families want this case to end,” Li said. “But what we want most of all is for our loved ones to finally have a proper resting place.”