The Comfort Women System and Women's International Human Rights

Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is to revisit the women's international human rights discourse in an effort to present positive insights into a feminist reconceptualization of human rights. For this purpose, I examine the Final Judgment of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (hereinafter the Tribunal) and assess the Tribunal's rationale in defining the comfort system as wartime sexual violence. I argue that the Tribunal's determination that the comfort system constituted wartime sexual violence falls short of addressing the full scope of the injustice of the comfort system that was constructed, operated, and maintained under the oppressive structures of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism and their interactions. I therefore conclude that the women's international human rights discourse should seriously consider the structural oppression from which individual women suffer and that a feminist reconceptualization of human rights should encompass the injustice of these structures.