HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
Grandma Yong-soo Lee denounces revival of the 2015 Japan-Korea Agreement!
July 24, 2022
We condemn South Korean President Yoon’s betrayal of “Comfort Women” and Forced Labor Victims
April 25, 2023
Here’s a quick review of 2022 from CARE
Watch a SHORT VIDEO with messages from a Chinese survivor Peng Zhuying and Grandma Yong-soo Lee, Professors Alexis Dudden and Peipei Qiu, Retired Judges Lillian Sing and Julie Tang. https://youtu.be/K31LCgoFDjQ
We also submitted the request to the UN’s Special Rapporteur Salvioli (Special Rapporteur on the Promotion on Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence) who met with Grandma Lee in Korea. Later, Mr. Salvioli wrote in the preliminary observations as follows:
“… I would like to recall the appeal from several international human rights mechanisms to revise the 2015 Agreement between Japan and the Republic of Korea on the issue of so called “Comfort Women”, which was concluded without victim’s acquiescence and leaves their demands for truth, justice and full reparation unaddressed.”
In October, UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights expressed regrets in the Concluding Observations on Japan for having made “no progress with regard to the Committee’s previous recommendations and continues to deny its obligation” and urged once again that Japan “to take immediate and effective legislative and administrative measures to ensure” full and impartial investigation, prosecution and punishment of the guilty, education about the issue and strong condemnation of any attempts to defame victims or to deny the events.
The Japanese government is escalating its efforts to revise the history – trying to remove the Girl Statue in Berlin and other places, blocking the inscription of the “comfort women” records in the UNESCO’s Memory of the World program, and supporting history deniers in the Western countries – but Japan’s revisionist attempts are failing, thanks to the Grandmas’ heroic struggle and leadership, and the people around the globe that responded to their voices.
CARE also submitted a Joint NGO Submission on Korea and Japan for the 4th Cycle of the Universal Periodic Review, which is scheduled for January 2023 in Geneva.
On the education front, we continued to collaborate with scholars, experts and students to raise awareness about the “comfort women” in the Western world. With a generous support from a donor, CARE established scholarships to support research and creative projects on the “comfort women” issue in 7 colleges in the US and Korea. We will have a public event this summer to showcase the outcome from the 2023 scholarship programs from these schools. Stay tuned!
- 2022 Association for Asian Studies
- US/ICOMOS – World Heritage USA/U.S. National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites
- The Philippine-Korea Youth Forum
- Cal State University Fullerton
- University of Montana, and more.
CARE also worked with students and filmmakers who are doing projects on the “comfort women” issue.
