“My family was devastated. I can’t help but regret it.
“My husband’s right to life has been taken away. This judicial formula wants to change.
Survivors of Japan’s so-called “hostage justice” formula recently gathered at the Japanese Diet to tell their stories about the long and painful history of abuses in the Japanese legal formula.
Nearly two hundred people, including 23 “hostage justice” survivors and their families, as well as 8 members of the Diet, gathered on November 10 to call for reform of Japan’s criminal justice system.
As a component of “hostage justice,” the government forces suspects to confess through repeated arrests and denials of bail. They are deprived of their right to remain silent, interrogated without a lawyer, and kept for long periods under constant surveillance in police stations. deprive detainees of their right to the presumption of innocence. These abusive practices have resulted in the destruction of lives and families, as well as many wrongful convictions.
There are many victims of “hostage justice” in Japan, but they find it difficult to speak out because of the stigma attached to arrest, detention, and sentencing. The compilation was notable because it was the first time that many survivors and their circle of family members were able to speak boldly about their private experiences.
Among them were Koki Takatsu (a pseudonym), accused of being guilty of her baby’s death and held in pre-trial detention for more than two years before being acquitted in 2021, and Yoshiko Nakamura, whose husband died in 2019 after being denied a good enough doctor while detained for five months.
Sakura Uchikoshi, a member of the Sejm, referred to a recent case in which a UK court refused to extradite a British suspect to Japan, raising human rights considerations about conceivable abuses in Japan’s criminal justice formula. “We want to bring our criminal justice formula from medieval times to medieval times. “according to foreign fashion standards,” he said.
The occasion was organized through the “End Hostage Justice in Japan” project, jointly led by Human Rights Watch and Innocence Project Japan, a Japanese non-governmental group. The Japanese government is paying attention and adopting extensive reforms, adding amendments to Japan’s criminal procedure code, to respect everyone’s rights to due procedure and a fair trial, and to make investigators and prosecutors more accountable.