US congressmen have joined activists to condemn the Japanese government's involvement in a lawsuit demanding the removal of a "comfort women" memorial statue in the Southern California city of Glendale.

"Sadly, some in the Japanese government continue to deny the existence of comfort women or the plight they suffered at the hands of the Imperial Army," said Ed Royce, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives.

"It is equally egregious that the Japanese government continues to support efforts to force Glendale to remove this memorial to hundreds of thousands of victims of military sexual slavery," he said in a statement.

The lawsuit against Glendale was filed in 2014. The plaintiffs claim the city unconstitutionally disrupted the US government's foreign policy and relationship with Japan by approving the "comfort women" statue for the city's central park.

The lawsuit was dismissed by a US District Court in 2015, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in August 2016. A request for a rehearing was denied by the appellate court in October.

In January, the case was brought to the US Supreme Court, and the Japanese government recently filed an amicus brief.

Japan's interference with the case drew an immediate backlash from the statue's supporters, including Congressmen Ed Royce and Adam Schiff and former Congressman Mike Honda.

"As Americans, it is our duty to always defend free speech and seek justice on behalf of the victims of human rights abuses, both past and present," said Royce.

Though the abuses took place more than 70 years ago, they are an issue for the present day, because demanding accountability for past abuses helps prevent future ones, he said.

In 2007, Honda and Royce co-authored House Resolution 121 calling on the Japanese government to acknowledge, apologize and accept responsibility for the coercion of young women into sexual slavery during its occupation of Asia and the Pacific. The resolution was passed in July 2007.

"The amicus brief will only serve to provide continued opportunities to teach and have a platform in the highest court of our land, from which we can replicate what grandmother Haksoon Kim has done in August of 1991 in Japan's District Court, where decades of silence of shame turned to demands for justice and apology," said Honda in a statement.

The 1,100-pound bronze statue depicts a girl in Korean garb sitting next to an empty chair and was erected in Glendale's Central Park in 2013. Funded by Korean groups, the statue was dedicated to comfort women, a term the Japanese government used for its military's notorious sex slavery of an estimated 200,000 women before and during World War II.

"I first visited this monument in 2014 and was taken by the beautiful serene memorial as an appropriate expression of our determination not to allow the suffering of the comfort women to pass into history unremembered," said Schiff in a statement.

"The cause of justice and human rights is never advanced by the denial of crimes against humanity, and it is our shared charge to hold close the memories of the 200,000 women enslaved, and to honor their memory," he said.

Glendale also filed respondent's brief last month, calling for denial of the petition.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com