In November 2015 three men entered a jewellery shop in Tokyo’s upmarket Omotesando district, beat and injured a security guard, smashed a showcase and stole 100 million yen’s (£600,000) worth of goods. The suspects identified by the police fled to the UK, where, after the intercession of Interpol, they were arrested. Japan, unsurprisingly, wants them back. But in the absence of an extradition treaty with the UK it needed to make a special request. Last week, the extradition request for one of the men was turned down – with the court noting that the suspect’s human rights could not be guaranteed by the Japanese criminal justice system.
This is on its face a gross insult to Japan. It is a first world country, G7 member and long-standing partner and ally. Yet apparently it can’t be trusted to provide a fair trial. In particular, the suspect had claimed that if extradited he would be made to confess under duress, and the court appears to have agreed. It is a damning indictment of Japan’s justice system, long criticised for its harshness, inflexibility, and indifference towards the detained. But how true is this characterisation?
Fully, would be the response of Human Rights Watch who just three months ago released a report which may have had a bearing on last week’s judgement. Coming in for particular criticism was the practice of detaining suspects for ‘long and arbitrary periods’ and repeatedly and aggressively interviewing them until a ‘confession’ is extracted. The report has an epigraph from a former prosecutor Nobuo Gohara that summarized its general theme:
‘You are basically held hostage until you give the prosecutors what they want. This is not how a criminal justice system should be working in a healthy country’
The report details iniquities such as abusive interrogations, denial of bail on spurious pretexts, the prohibition on communication with family and friends, and unaccountable and overpowerful prosecutors. An article by David T Johnson in the Asian Journal of Criminology estimates that interrogations in Japan last 30 to 50 times as long as in the US, often in police holding cells (‘a hotbed of wrongful confessions’) rather than detention centres, and cites a report from the former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghon’s lawyer, Takashi Takano, which estimated that there are 1,500 wrongful convictions a year.
Ghosn’s case was illuminating and consequential. In 2019 the former Renault/Nissan/Mitsubishi CEO, who had been arrested on charges of false accounting (and interrogated for 500 hours) escaped from custody in Tokyo claiming that he would ‘no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant, and basic human rights are denied.’ A UN working group subsequently investigated Japan’s detention system and declared it fundamentally unfair.
The Japanese government dismissed the UN’s opinion as ‘totally unacceptable’, but the reproach undoubtedly stung and poured salt on a suppurating wound. In response to criticism, from within and outside Japan, there were significant reforms in 2019 beefing up suspects’ rights, giving more powers to defence attorneys and mandating the videoing of interrogations – though there is debate as to how fully these measures have been implemented or whether they go far enough.
While there are certainly serious issues with the Japanese criminal justice system a partial defence can be made. Some of the statistics used are misleading. The oft-cited scarily high conviction rate (98 per cent) is often used to suggest that anyone scooped up by the police in connection with a crime is destined for jail regardless of the evidence. In truth the rate is a result of the fact that only strong cases make it to court, with weaker suits dismissed or dealt with at a lower level.
More broadly, imperfect though the Japanese system undoubtedly is, it is probably effective in disincentivising would-be criminals from contemplating a life of crime in the first place – Japan has a remarkably low level of violent crime. To take one example, the strict rules around illegal drugs are a particular success, with strikingly low levels of use meaning the country is spared the massive health, societal and related crime problems endemic in the West. Though the punishment meted out to someone who perhaps on a single occasion smoked marijuana might seem harsh, the message this communicates may well keep people from embarking on a dark and disastrous path. As a deterrent it seems to work. Does our system?
It is interesting that this case has happened at the very moment when Julian Assange is now ‘dangerously close’ to extradition to the US on charges that appear to many to be politically motivated. Assange faces a hellish future in a high security hell hole that would make Japan’s spartan but at least apparently safe prison estate look like a holiday camp. While the charges against the suspect in the Tokyo jewellery heist appear clear, and the evidence (security cameras) apparently substantial, the same can hardly be said of Assange. A campaign to get his extradition stopped has been active for a while now, but there is no sign that the Home Office will relent.
But then we mustn’t offend the Americans, with whom we enjoy a ‘special relationship’.
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