Top UN rights official meets former ‘comfort women’ in Seoul

SEOUL: The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights met with three ageing ‘comfort women’ on a visit to Seoul yesterday and promised to continue advocating on behalf of South Korean victims of Japan’s wartime system of sex slavery.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein met with the three, who are among some 50 surviving South Korean ‘comfort women’, at a museum in Seoul dedicated to the women forced into sexual slavery during World War II.

Al Hussein would ‘continue to advocate on their behalf’, he was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency after meeting with them.

“I will of course stay in touch with them and visit them again as often as I can,” he said.

About 200,000 women, mainly from Korea but also from China, Indonesia and other Asian nations, were forced into sexual slavery during the war.

South Korea says Tokyo does not fully accept its guilt and has not sufficiently atoned.

But Japan insists the issue was settled in the 1965 bilateral agreementthatrestoreddiplomatic ties between the two nations, which saw Tokyo make a total payment of 800 million in grants or loans to its former colony.

The issue has strained relations between Seoul and Tokyo for years with South Korean President Park Geun-Hye saying there can be no meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe until Japan makes amends for its ‘comfort women’ system. — AFP MONTREAL: Footprints recently discovered on the shores of a small island off the west coast of Canada may be the oldest in North America, researchers say.

The find also bolsters a novel theory that the first inhabitants of the continent migrated from Alaska south along the coast by boat rather than inland on foot.

However, the discovery has yet to be verified and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

A team led by University of Victoria archeologists Duncan McLaren and Daryl Fedje found a single footprint last year in the soft clay on the shores of Calvert Island, about 500 kilometers northwest of Vancouver.

The researchers, backed by the Hakai Institute, returned a few months ago and dug up more footprints.

These were determined to have belonged to two adults and a child seemingly huddled around a stoneringed fire pit. — AFP