“My family was torn apart. I truly cannot stop regretting.”
“The right to life was taken from my husband. This justice system needs to change.”
Survivors of Japan’s so-called “hostage justice” system got here collectively not too long ago on the Japanese Diet to share their tales of the lengthy, painful historical past of abuses below Japan’s authorized system.
Nearly 200 individuals, together with 23 “hostage justice” survivors and their households in addition to eight Diet members, gathered on November 10 to demand reform of Japan’s felony justice system.
Under “hostage justice,” authorities coerce suspects to admit by repeated arrests and denial of bail. They are sometimes stripped of their proper to stay silent, questioned with out a lawyer, and detained for extended intervals below fixed surveillance in police stations. Authorities deny these arrested of their proper to presumption of innocence. These abusive practices have resulted in lives and households being torn aside in addition to quite a few wrongful convictions.
There are many victims of “hostage justice” in Japan, however it has been tough for them to talk out because of the stigma connected to arrest, detention, and conviction. The gathering was outstanding in that it was the primary time that many survivors and members of the family had been capable of courageously talk about their private expertise.
Among them was Koki Takatsu (a pseudonym), who was accused of being accountable for the loss of life of his toddler youngster and positioned in pretrial detention for greater than two years earlier than being acquitted in 2021, and Yoshiko Nakamura, whose husband died in 2019 after being denied satisfactory medical companies whereas being detained for 5 months.
Diet member Sakura Uchikoshi raised a current case through which a courtroom within the United Kingdom refused to extradite a British suspect to Japan, citing human rights considerations about attainable abuses in Japan’s felony justice system. “We must bring our criminal justice from the medieval era to a modern international standard,” she stated.
The occasion was hosted by the “End ‘Hostage Justice’ in Japan” undertaking, which is collectively run by Human Rights Watch and Innocence Project Japan, a Japanese nongovernmental group. The Japanese authorities ought to hear and undertake wide-ranging reforms, together with amending Japan’s felony process code, to respect everybody’s rights to due course of and to a good trial, and make investigators and prosecutors extra accountable.
Source: Human Rights Watch