Challenging the Global Human Rights Regime: Transnational Significance of the "Comfort Women" Redress Movement

ABSTRACT:The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of the movement to challenge the Japanese military system of sexual slavery as a transnational women's movement. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which the process came to resonate with global human rights regimes. Combining oral history interviews with archival research and participant observation, I locate the ways in which the human rights framework of the international community, including the UN, has been changing through the varied forms of women's solidarity. I argue that, for around 30 years, the interplay between activists and victim-survivors played a pivotal role in constituting the global norms of women's rights through various international solidarity activities starting in the early 1990s. Due to this non-Western women's movement to debunk the local/global framework, the UN bodies relating to women's issues could address the "comfort women" issue as a global issue.