Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Abstract
Transnational human rights litigation has emerged as a powerful tool to remediate state and corporate abuses. Courts, however, rarely evince the same enthusiasm for these lawsuits as practitioners, scholars, and activists. For the past thirty-five years, “comfort women,” or survivors of wartime sexual exploitation, have used transnational litigation to seek redress from the Japanese government. Yet they have lost nearly all their cases. This Article uses ten “comfort women” lawsuits from Japan to test the limits of transnational human rights litigation. While judges rarely found for the comfort women, their verdicts nonetheless advanced the redress issue by showing the illegality of the system; depicting the brutal experience of abduction, rape, and confinement that many comfort women endured; and expressing moral condemnation for sexual slavery. This Article contributes to the debate over transnational human rights litigation by focusing on cases that have attracted little scholarly attention in the West yet continue to be litigated in East Asia.
Recommended Citation
Timothy Webster, Cold Comfort: Japan’s “Comfort Women” Litigation Under Transnational Law, 47 ᴘᴀ. ᴊ. ɪɴᴛ'ʟ ʟ. 564 (2026).
Included in
Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, International Humanitarian Law Commons, International Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Transnational Law Commons
