Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

I, and also on behalf of Senator Stott Despoja and Senator Nettle, move:

That the Senate—

(a)

notes that:

(i)

between 1932 and 1945, more than 200 000 women and children of Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian, Burmese and Dutch origin were kidnapped or forced into a sex slavery system enforced by the Japanese Imperial Army,

(ii)

these victims, some as young as 12, were systematically raped and tortured in so-called ‘comfort stations’, and coerced to have sex with up to 40 soldiers a day, every day for years,

(iii)

62 years later the Japanese Government still refuses to accept responsibility for this crime, or acknowledge its guilt, or to apologise to the hundreds of thousands of women who suffered from these inhumane deeds, and

(iv)

44 members of the Japanese Parliament recently took out an advertisement in the Washington Post denying that this sex slavery ever occurred; and

(b)

calls on the Government to:

(i)

urge the Japanese Diet to pass a resolution to formally apologise to the women who were forced into sexual slavery during the Second World War,

(ii)

urge the Japanese Government to provide fair compensation to these victims, and

(iii)

urge the Japanese Government to accurately teach the history of comfort women in Japanese schools.

Question put.