The government has rejected calls to disclose the results of radiation level checks conducted on fishery goods caught near Japan, a civic group said Wednesday.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety on Tuesday dismissed the information disclosure request filed by the Lawyers for a Democratic Society, the group said.

"As the information is related to a case pending at the World Trade Organization, (the disclosure) could lead to a leakage of our strategy to Japan," the ministry was quoted by the group as saying.

The lawyers association, however, countered that the reason provided by the authorities was groundless since the government has to submit its findings to the WTO and Japan anyways.

Tokyo filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization against Seoul's import ban of its fishery goods.

South Korea has banned imports of all fishery products from eight Japanese prefectures, including Fukushima, where the 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor, marking the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster.

The import ban was imposed in September 2013 after reports that massive amounts of radioactive materials and contaminated water from the Fukushima reactor were being dumped in waters surrounding Japan. This caused serious safety concerns here, that not only affected Japanese imports but the local fishery sector as a whole. (Yonhap)