Introduction Roger Hood1


Tis important report will be of great interest and concern to all those who seek to bring about improvements in the processes and conditions under which the death penalty is enforced in Japan and its eventual abolition.


It aims to inform a wider audience than just government officials of the obligations of Japan as regards the standards to be set and upheld under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) of 1966, which Japan ratified in 1979, and the Safeguards Guaranteeing the Rights of those Facing the Death Penalty, which were first adopted unanimously by the United Nations in 1984 and subsequently added to in 1989 and 1996.


Japan ratified the ICCPR without any reservations. Although Article 6(2) does not ban the death penalty, it restricts its scope to ‘the most serious crimes’ in those states which have not yet abolished the death penalty and sets standards for protecting the arbitrary deprivation of the right to life (Article 6(1)) through the insistence on fair trials, the provision of procedures for appeal, the granting of clemency, and the humane treatment of persons under sentence of death. Tis report demonstrates that Japan has remained resistant to applying several of these standards and has failed to meet the requirement in Article 7 not to subject persons to ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment’. Moreover, Japan has remained deaf to the inherent appeal in Article 6 of the ICCPR to move towards abolition of the death penalty, as set out in Article 6(6) which states ‘Nothing in this article shall be invoked to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment by any State Party to the present Covenant’. Te underlying reason for this resistance is that Japan has insisted that whether or not the death penalty remains on the statute book or is protected by the constitution is predominantly a sovereign criminal justice policy issue, the nature and operation of which should be decided by the national government informed by the wishes of the people, as elicited by public opinion polls.


Tis report responds to both these claims: firstly by demonstrating that Japan cannot avoid its obligations under treaties it has signed and secondly, by showing that the claim that the majority of the Japanese population demand the death penalty and would never accept its abolition is dubious, over-stated, and a result of policies that surround the death penalty with much secrecy. In early 2008, following the resolution at the UN General Assembly in December 2007 to call for a universal moratorium on the use of the death penalty, which Japan opposed, the government of Japan joined with 57 other countries in signing a Note Verbale to the UN Secretary-General objecting to that resolution on the grounds that ‘there is no international consensus that the death penalty should be abolished’ and that capital punishment is ‘ … first and foremost an issue of the criminal justice system and an important deterring element vis-à-vis the most serious crimes’. Japan voted against the moratorium resolution again when it was introduced in 2008, 2010, and 2012, but it no longer endorsed the Note Verbale of dissociation following the votes in 2008 and 2010 and is not expected to do so when it will undoubtedly be presented again in the spring of 2013 following the 2012


1 CBE, QC, DCL, FBA. Professor Emeritus of Criminology, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. iv


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