Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
Transnational human rights litigation is commonly associated with developments in Europe and the Americas during the 1990s. But Asian actors have used legal mobilisation to hold corporate actors to account since at least the 1970s. This chapter charts the first usages of transnational litigation in East Asia’s Word War II redress movement, akin to the Holocaust Restitution movement of the West. Korean and Chinese forced labourers liaised with Japanese attorneys, activists and academics to press compensation claims against Japanese corporations for wartime human rights abuses in Tokyo. Legal mobilisation did not succeed in the traditional sense. Yet, the formation of epistemic communities (activists, attorneys, academics) across East Asia reflected new modalities of transnational cooperation that produced settlement agreements in the 1990s and 2000s that resolved some of the plaintiffs’ demands.
Recommended Citation
Timothy Webster, The Transnationalization of Civil Society in East Asia's War Redress Movement, in ᴄᴏʀᴘᴏʀᴀᴛᴇ ᴀᴄᴄᴏᴜɴᴛᴀʙɪʟɪᴛʏ ꜰᴏʀ ʜᴜᴍᴀɴ ʀɪɢʜᴛꜱ ᴀʙᴜꜱᴇꜱ (Raluca Grosescu & John G. Dale eds., 2025).
Included in
Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, International Humanitarian Law Commons, International Law Commons, Transnational Law Commons
