Korean students at Harvard University have issued a statement denouncing Harvard law school Professor John Mark Ramseyer who claimed in a recent article that Japanese military sex slaves during World War Two were willing prostitutes.

The Korean Association of Harvard Law School said Thursday that it "strongly condemns the deliberate erasure of human rights violations and war crimes."

They said Professor Ramseyer’s arguments are factually inaccurate and misleading and without any convincing evidence, he argues that no government “forced women into prostitution.”

The students said that decades’ worth of Korean scholarship, primary sources, and third-party reports challenge such a characterization and that none are mentioned, cited, or considered in his arguments.  

The statement said that he also ignores expansive work done by international organizations such as the UN and Amnesty International, which has conclusively found that the so-called “comfort women” were coerced, kidnapped or forced by the Japanese government.

The statement was jointly signed by five other organizations including the Harvard Asia Law Society and the Harvard Law School China Law Association. 

Japan's Sankei Shimbun newspaper earlier introduced the professor's article titled "Contracting for sex in the Pacific War” in which he describes the forced sex slavery organized by Japan during wartime as a "consenting, contractual process" where women could negotiate for wages.