A Japanese high court Thursday upheld a lower court's decision rejecting appeals by a group of Chinese workers seeking compensation for being forced to work as slave laborers during World War II.

The 27 appellants plan to move the Supreme Court against yesterday's decision. Originally, there were 42 plaintiffs but 15 of them have died since.

The lawsuit was filed in 1999 against the Japanese government and six companies, with the appellants alleging they had been forced to work as laborers in mines and factories during the early 1940s, and demanded an apology and $7 million as compensation.

"The process of detaining them, transferring them to Japan and forcing them to work was illegal," Judge Koki Ito of the Sapporo High Court was quoted as saying.

But the plaintiffs lost their right to seek compensation from Japan after the signing of the Joint Communique in 1972 that restored bilateral ties between Beijing and Tokyo, Ito said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, however, urged the Japanese government to handle the issue of wartime forced labor justly.

Conscripting people to work as "forced or slave laborers is a grave crime committed by the Japanese militarist regime against the Chinese people", Qin said, and urged Tokyo to deal properly with the issue.

Wartime weapons

Japan reportedly may not be able to clean up all the wartime chemical weapons that its militarist army left behind in China before 2012.

Japan was supposed to remove all chemical weapons that its militarist army had left behind in China before April 31, 2007, in line with the Chemical Weapon Convention signed 10 years ago, local media said.

Though the deadline was extended by five years to 2012 by China as a compromise, Japan has not shown a positive and practical attitude to the task.

A yawning gap does exist between Beijing and Tokyo on the identification and number of Japanese chemical weapons in China.

FM for Bishkek

Qin said Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi will fly to Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, next week to attend a foreign ministers' meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on July 9.

The foreign ministers of the SCO member countries will discuss ways to ensure that preparations for the organization's Bishkek summit, to be held in mid-August, are of the highest quality, Qin said.