The Canadian Parliament has adopted a resolution urging Japan to formally apologize to women forced into sexual slavery during World War Two.

Olivia Chow, a member of the New Democratic Party which proposed the resolution, welcomed the adoption at the House of Commons, saying Japan has yet to provide an appropriate apology to women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.

Chow stressed that the Canadian parliament has a moral obligation to make public the suffering of the former sex slaves, adding that Canadians need to know about the issue.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved a similar resolution in July. The lower house of the Dutch Parliament also passed a motion on Tuesday urging Japan to apologize and compensate victims of its military sexual slavery.

Meanwhile, according to Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Japan’s Chuo University, the number of women who were forced into sexual slavery during the Second World War stood at between 50-thousand to as many as 200-thousand.

Yoshimi said in a research paper that the fact that most of the sex slaves were Koreans or Chinese shows that most of the women came from areas colonized by Japan during the war and that racism clearly existed.

Yoshimi will release the results of his paper during an academic seminar in Seoul Friday.