Civic groups call for UNESCO listing of comfort women documents

A coalition of civic groups on Sunday urged UNESCO to swiftly move forward with a long-stalled bid to list documents related to Japan's wartime sexual slavery of women on its Memory of the World Register.

In May 2016, civic groups from 8 countries, including South Korea and China, made an official request for the UNESCO listing of documents related to women, mostly Koreans, forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II.

The documents, submitted under the title "Voices of the Comfort Women," include victims' testimonies and other materials related to the wartime sexual slavery.

The number of surviving comfort women victims has continued to decline, with only five left in South Korea, six in China, five in the Philippines, about 20 in Indonesia and one in Timor-Leste, according to the civic groups.

The listing process has been stalled since UNESCO's International Advisory Committee decided in 2017 to facilitate dialogue between the coalition and four other groups from Japan and the United States that had separately submitted records on the same issue. The first talks, initially planned for June 2025, have been postponed twice.