WIWCT

In the winter of 2000, in a makeshift courtroom in Tokyo, a different kind of justice was born.
 

Before a panel of international judges, not convened by any state, Comfort Women survivors bravely took the stand and courageously spoke of abduction, rape, sexual slavery, confinement, and torture, and decried decades of state silence. This was the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal (WIWCT) for the Trial of Japan's Military Sexual Slavery during the Second World War, which was convened as an addendum to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). This historic legal and political intervention challenged not only the Japanese state but also the very foundations of international law itself. Convened more than fifty years after the war, it rendered a judgment of profound consequence, that the Japanese military’s Comfort Women system constituted a crime against humanity, and that the postwar international legal order had participated in its cover-up.
 

This is the story of that Tribunal, the court that the world’s established legal systems did not authorize, but which survivors and feminists created. The Women’s Tribunal was not a mere symbolic gesture but a transformative feminist intervention in international law, one that emerged from the grassroots, across borders, and in open defiance of both imperial impunity and judicial exclusion. While legal scholars debated the failure of international criminal law in addressing sexual violence, few have considered how Asian feminist activism has produced alternative legal imaginaries: women’s tribunals, public hearings, and truth-telling forums that re-center survivors and decolonize the law. The Women’s Tribunal precisely did that: it subverted traditional legal hierarchies, exposed the limits of state-centered accountability, and created a transnational platform for survivors to speak the truth, finally obtaining justice.
 

The Women’s Tribunal was held in Tokyo, the symbolic site of both historical denial and feminist reclamation. It is a reckoning, with the global legal order that buried it, born of feminist defiance, built to expose the violence buried beneath war memorials, treaties, and denialism. It was a trial that defied power, centered survivors, and forced the world to ask: how to obtain justice when the system refuses to deliver it?
  

And if the state refuses to remember, can we create a memory strong enough to stand in its place? 

It is testimony. It is defiance. And it is legacy.
 

The politics of archival survival is the goal that this website aims to achieve; it is a residual mechanism of the Tribunal. It will take time to gather documents from Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, but we have started. Many comfort women survivors have passed away without seeing justice. Their voices live only through their recorded testimonies, but even these are at risk. Archives are not only built, they are vulnerable to a lack of funding, political pressure, digital modernity, and cultural erasure. This website is built on that infrastructure to sustain the legacy of feminist legal defiance across generations. We have to ask how such violence happened to women during the war. We have to stand vigilant to see to it that such atrocities will not happen again, even as countries continue to wage war with others.
 

Join us in this endeavor. Support us as we strive to raise sufficient funds to operate this website. In doing so, you will help forge a feminist counter-archive, an insurgent space of memory that interrupts official history and insists:
 

We were there. We remember. We will not be silenced.