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International Humanitarian Law Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in International Humanitarian Law
Japan’S Transnational War Reparations Litigation: An Empirical Analysis, Timothy Webster
Japan’S Transnational War Reparations Litigation: An Empirical Analysis, Timothy Webster
Faculty Scholarship
Negotiating war reparations is traditionally the province of the political branches, yet in recent decades, domestic courts have presided over hundreds of compensation lawsuits stemming from World War II. In the West, governments responded to these lawsuits with elaborate compensation mechanisms. In East Asia, by contrast, civil litigation continues apace. This Article analyzes eighty-three lawsuits filed in Japan, the epicenter of Asia’s World War II reparations movement. While many scholars criticize the passivity of Japanese courts on war-related issues, this Article detects a meaningful role for Japanese courts in the reparations process: awarding compensation, verifying facts, and allocating legal liability. …
The Minds Behind The Movement: The Role Of Academics In East Asia’S War Reparations Litigation, Timothy Webster
The Minds Behind The Movement: The Role Of Academics In East Asia’S War Reparations Litigation, Timothy Webster
Faculty Scholarship
East Asia's war compensation litigation simultaneously unites diverse regional actors (lawyers, survivors, activists) and fray international relations (as recent verdicts from South Korea attest). However, one view of the merits of these lawsuits is that they have reconfigured transnational activism in East Asia, exhumed forgotten and suppressed histories of Japanese aggression, and on occasion compensated victims of World War II. This Article highlights the role of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese activists, lawyers and scholars in researching, filing, litigating and appealing over 80 lawsuits between 1972 and the present.