S.Korean parliament passes bill to designate Aug. 14 as day for WWII sex slavery victims
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E-mail Xinhua, November 24, 2017
South Korea's parliament on Friday passed a bill to designate Aug. 14 as a special day for victims to sexual slavery for Japanese military brothels during World War II.
The revision to the law on support for the wartime sex enslavement victims and remembrance of their sufferings was passed through the National Assembly during the plenary session.
The designation was aimed to make known and remember the sufferings of the victims as sex slaves for the Imperial Japan's military brothels during the Pacific War.
Historians say about 200,000 women were forced into sexual servitude during wartime. The victims are euphemistically called the comfort women.
On Aug. 14 in 1991, Kim Hak-sun, one of the late comfort women victims, made the first-ever public testimony on the wartime crime against humanity. Currently, only 33 comfort women victims survived in South Korea.
The revised law also required the government to listen to opinions of the victims before drawing up policies related to the victims' rights.
The Moon Jae-in government, which was inaugurated in May, has been reviewing the legitimacy of an agreement with Japan in December 2015 to "finally and irreversibly" settle the comfort women issue.
The deal was criticized by the victims as well as ordinary people as it failed to listen to the victims' opinions before announcing it and lacked the mentioning of the Japanese government's legal responsibility for the wartime atrocity.
The Moon government has said such a deal cannot be emotionally accepted by the victims and the general public.
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