Mr. Makoto Taki
Minister of Justice of Japan
#216 Shugiin Giin-Kaikan, 2-1-2
Nagata-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
100-8982
Paris 7th August 2012
Your Excellency,
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Coalition against the Death Penalty (WCADP) join their member organization in Japan, the Center for Prisoners’ Rights (CPR), to strongly condemn the execution by hanging of Mr Junya Hattori and Mr Kyozo Matsumura on Friday 3rd August. These executions bring the number of executions in Japan to five this year, and blatantly contradict international trends towards abolition.
Junya Hattori was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, yet on the request of public prosecutors who had appealed against the original verdict, the Tokyo High Court condemned him to death. Kyozo Matsumura’s death sentence was finalized when he withdrew an appeal to the High Court, another reminder that Japan does not have a mandatory appeal system despite repeated recommendations by UN bodies.
In January this year, we wrote to the Government of Japan (http://www.fidh.org/Open-letter-on-the-abolition-of) lauding it for not carrying out any execution in 2011. However, we strongly believe that this year’s executions contradict all past efforts by the Government of Japan to end its use of the death penalty. We take this opportunity to remind you that as state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Japan must respect the right to life.
No justice system in the world is perfect and none is immune to wrongful convictions of the innocent. The death penalty not only can result in irreversible tragedies but also is not an effective deterrent of crimes, as its proponents would argue in spite of ample evidence and experience in many countries to the contrary. The lack of adequate protection of the rights of the accused in Japanese criminal procedures, identified in 2008 in the FIDH-CPR fact-finding mission report “The law of silence, going against the international trend” (http://www.fidh.org/The-law-of-silence-going-against), only adds to the risk of wrongful convictions and executions.
FIDH and WCADP call on the Government of Japan to refrain from approving any execution order and establish, as soon as possible, an independent, broad-based panel of experts, including civil society representatives, to study and make recommendations to the government on the abolition of the death penalty. The execution orders on Friday 3rd August are even more shocking given that they were issued a few days before a meeting you will have with CPR and Amnesty International Japan who appealed to you not to authorize any execution.
We hope that you will seriously and urgently take our concerns and recommendations into consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Souhayr Belhassen
FIDH president
Florence Bellivier
WCADP president