SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Thirty years after going public with her story of abduction, rape and forced prostitution by Japan’s wartime military, Lee Yong-soo fears she’s running out of time to get closure to her ordeal.

The 93-year-old is the face of a dwindling group of South Korean sexual slavery survivors who have been demanding since the early 1990s that the Japanese Government fully accept culpability and offer an unequivocal apology.

Her latest — and possibly final — push is to persuade the governments of South Korea and Japan to settle their decades-long impasse over sexual slavery by seeking the judgement of the United Nations.

Lee leads an international group of sexual slavery survivors and advocates — including those from the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Australia and East Timor — who sent a petition UN human rights investigators last week to press Seoul and Tokyo to jointly refer the issue to UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ). The group wants Seoul to initiate arbitration proceedings against Japan with a UN panel on torture if Tokyo doesn’t agree to bring the case to the ICJ.

It’s unclear whether South Korea, which will swear in a new government in May, will consider bringing the matter to the UN when it faces pressure to improve relations with Japan amid a turbulent moment in global affairs. The country has never fought a case under such proceedings, and anything less than a lopsided victory might be seen at home as a defeat.

It’s hard for Lee to be patient when other survivors keep dying.

She worries about their plight being forgotten or distorted by Japan’s apparent efforts to downplay the coercive and violent nature of the World War II sexual slavery, and exclude it from schoolbooks.

She cried as she described how she was dragged from home as a 16-year-old to serve as a sex slave for Japan’s Imperial Army, and the harsh abuse she endured at a Japanese military brothel in Taiwan until the end of the war — a story she first told the world in 1992.

“Both South Korea and Japan keep waiting for us to die, but I will fight until the very end,” Lee said in a recent interview at The Associated Press office in Seoul, across the street from the Japanese Embassy. She said her campaign is aimed at pressuring Japan to fully accept responsibility and acknowledge its past military sexual slavery as war crimes, and properly educate its public about the abuses through textbooks and memorials.

“I think time has so far waited for me so that I can clench my teeth and do everything that I can to resolve this issue,” Lee said.

Grievances over sexual slavery, forced labour, and other abuses stemming from Japan’s brutal colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula before the end of World War II have strained Seoul-Tokyo relations in recent years as the animosities spilled over to trade and military cooperation issues. The disputes have frustrated Washington, which wants stronger three-way cooperation with its Asian allies to confront challenges posed by North Korea and China.

The upcoming government change in Seoul has inspired cautious hope in Japan about improved ties. After winning the election earlier this month, conservative South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol vowed “future-focused” cooperation with Japan.