UN Urges Japanese Government to "Continue Efforts to Guarantee Rights to Comfort Women Compensation Claims"

On the 29th (local time), the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) recommended that the Japanese government continue efforts to guarantee the rights of victims to claim compensation regarding the issue of Japanese military comfort women during the Japanese colonial period.

According to Kyodo News and others, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women announced its final recommendations on Japanese women's policies at the UN Geneva office on the same day.

In a previous recommendation to the Japanese government in March 2016, the committee pointed out that the 2015 Japan-South Korea government agreement on comfort women "did not fully adopt a victim-centered approach focusing on comfort women victims," and stated that "the rights of victims demanding truth, justice, and compensation must be guaranteed, and solutions that reflect their positions should be pursued."

The committee also urged that "the comfort women issue be included in textbooks and that objective historical facts be ensured to be known by many students and the general public." However, in April 2021, the Japanese government’s Cabinet adopted the view that "using the term 'military comfort women' may cause misunderstandings" and that "simply using the term 'comfort women' is appropriate." Since this measure was taken to dilute the coerciveness of comfort women mobilization, the content denying the coerciveness of comfort women mobilization has increased even more in Japanese textbooks that have passed government verification.

Along with this, the committee recommended that the Japanese government review the Civil Code provision that mandates married couples to use the same surname and introduce a "selective separate surname system." This is the fourth recommendation. Furthermore, regarding the "Imperial Household Law," which recognizes succession rights to the throne only for males, the committee recommended revision, stating that it is difficult to reconcile with the ideals of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The Japanese Imperial Household Law stipulates in Article 1 that "succession to the throne shall be by male descendants in the male line (males born to male members of the imperial family)," and specifies that female members of the imperial family lose their status if they marry someone outside the imperial family.

The committee was established in 1982 under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. It proposes improvements or recommendations on issues related to discrimination against women but does not have legal binding force.