Thirty years after going public with her story of abduction, rape, and forced prostitution by Japan’s wartime military, Lee Yong-soo fears she’s running out of time to get closure to her ordeal. The 93-year-old is the face of a dwindling group of South Korean sexual slavery survivors who have been demanding since the early 1990s that the Japanese government fully accept culpability and offer an unequivocal apology. Her latest, and possibly final, push is to persuade the governments of South Korea and Japan to settle their decades-long impasse over sexual slavery by seeking judgement of the United Nations.
Lee leads an international group of sexual slavery survivors and advocates, including those from the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Australia, and East Timor, who sent a petition to UN human rights investigators last week to press Seoul and Tokyo to jointly refer the issue to UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ). The group wants Seoul to initiate arbitration proceedings against Japan with a UN panel on torture if Tokyo does not agree to bring the case to the ICJ. It is unclear whether South Korea, which will swear in a new government in May, will consider bringing the matter to the UN when it faces pressure to improve relations with Japan amid a turbulent moment in global affairs. The country has never fought a case under such proceedings, and anything less than a lopsided victory might be seen at home as a defeat.
Read more here: https://apnews.com/article/japan-asia-seoul-united-nations-south-korea-…
