The 1009th Wednesday Demonstration. Women into their 80s and 90s have gathered in front of the Japanese Embassy since 1992 to demand justice for Japan's system of sexual slavery during the rule of Imperial Japan. Flickr/Joonyoung Kim. Some rights reserved.
The search for justice of those who have been affected by mass violations of human rights takes many forms and may continue for decades. Although many of those who have been victimised by mass violations of human rights seek formal (state-sponsored) mechanisms to assess the responsibility of those who engaged in the atrocities, for several decades civil society has accepted that, at times, it must fulfil the lacunae that can take place when a state (and/or the international community) refuses to act or delivers what one might call partial justice. The survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system–those girls and women taken by the Japanese military and forced to remain in military brothels–began speaking about their experiences in the early 1990s.
Although the Japanese government issued a lukewarm apology in 1993, the government has never accepted its responsibility to acknowledge the serious criminal nature of what occurred, nor offered to make restitution to the women. In December 2000 civil society organisations responding to the wishes of the comfort women held the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery [the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal], an important development for international law and the creation of a fuller and more accurate historical record.
