The Japanese government should take responsibility for clearing the chemical weapons discarded by Japanese troops during World War II and compensate Chinese victims, said the announcement by the All-China Lawyers' Association, China Legal Aid Foundation and China Foundation for Human Rights Development.

The Japanese court should maintain justice and respect the plaintiffs' human rights, so as to win forgiveness and trust from the Chinese people and the international community, it said.

The Tokyo High Court on Wednesday rejected the demands by Chinese plaintiffs seeking compensation from the Japanese government for their suffering caused by chemical weapons left behind by the Imperial Japanese Army in China at the end of World War II.

The court overturned an earlier ruling by the Tokyo District Court in September 2003, which ruled that the Japanese government should pay a total of 190 million yen (1.56 million U.S. dollars) to 13 Chinese victims or families of victims.

In the new ruling, the presiding judge recognized the fact that the Japanese Army abandoned chemical weapons in China. However, the judge denied the possibility that the disaster could have been avoided if the Japanese government had taken necessary measures, including providing the Chinese government with timely information on the abandoned chemical weapons so that the latter could have disposed of them promptly and appropriately.

Japan has signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and thus is obligated to ban production and proliferation of chemical weapons and to clear existing ones, the announcement said.

In 1999, the Chinese and Japanese governments signed the Memorandum of Understanding on the Destruction of the Chemical Weapons Abandoned by Japan in China, in which the Japanese government had promised to properly handle related problems, it said.

But the Japanese government has never notified China of any information about discarded chemical weapons, nor has it ever voluntarily expressed the will to clear those weapons, it said.

"Against this background, the ruling by the Tokyo High Court turned a blind eye to the victims' human rights and betrayed judicial fairness. We strongly condemn it," it said.

The lawsuits, brought up in 1996, involved the leakage of toxic chemicals and shell explosions from 1974 to 1995. After the Tokyo District Court's landmark ruling in 2003, the Japanese government appealed for a high court ruling.

According to Chinese statistics, Japan abandoned at least two million tons of chemical weapons at about 40 sites in 15 Chinese provinces at the end of World War II, most of them in the three northeast provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.