Nationalist groups claim UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is ‘biased’ on issue of women forced into prostitution during colonial era
C onservative groups in Japan have accused a United Nations committee on racial discrimination of bias towards the country, after its members insisted the government take responsibility for violating the rights of wartime sex slaves.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination must be reformed so its composition is “balanced and fair” and it issues recommendations “based on facts rather than hearsay,” the critics say.
If not, they say, the Japanese government should withdraw from the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) or resign from the Human Rights Council.
“The commission’s recommendations are extremely biased and not based on the evidence,” said Hiromichi Moteki, acting chairman of Tokyo’s Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact . “We are only asking that the committee’s decisions be based on facts, which we feel is [reasonable], but these stupid recommendations are a violation of the beliefs of Japanese people.”
The 96th session of ICERD was held in Geneva over 24 days from August 6, with Japan among a number of nations – including China and Cuba – providing updates on domestic efforts to prevent racial discrimination.
Those presentations were followed by information provided by civic groups.
Among the 11 organisations from Japan was the Academics’ Alliance for Correcting Groundless Criticisms of Japan, which declared in its submission to the UN that Japan was a “pioneer in this field because she has suffered racial discrimination for many decades”, adding that racial discrimination was the cause of the outbreak of the second world war in the Pacific.
Japan was also represented by the Happiness Realisation Research Institute – which said Japanese children were “suffering severe mental harm” because of false depictions of colonial-era “comfort women” as “sex slaves” – and the Zaitokukai political organisation, which claims to be committed to abolishing the “privileges” of Korean residents of Japan and insists there is no discrimination against women or the ethnic Okinawan or Ainu populations of Japan.
The UN has estimated that Japan forced some 200,000 women, most of them Korean, into working at military brothels before and during the second world war.
