A former U.N. researcher who compiled a report urging Japan to apologize and pay compensation over the "comfort women" issue said she sees no need to correct her report made public in 1996 that referred to testimony retracted recently by the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese daily.

"We met many comfort women in Korea especially. It was very clear that they were abducted, by no means could one say they voluntarily joined," Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy said in a recent interview in Colombo.

In a review published in August, the Asahi Shimbun retracted articles from the 1980s and 1990s that reported on a Japanese man who said women on the South Korean island of Jeju were forcibly and violently taken to work in brothels for the Imperial Japanese military, admitting that recent fact-checking had shown his accounts were false. The man, Seiji Yoshida, has since died.