Death penalty foes gather in Tokyo to push for abolition

Tokyo Detention Center

While the global trend is toward abolishing or putting a moratorium on capital punishment, Japan remains a stalwart practitioner, leaving it and the United States the only two countries in the Group of Seven major industrialized nations where executions still take place.

With international pressure growing against Japan to scrap the system, abolitionists, scholars, lawmakers and law enforcement officers from Japan, Norway and the U.S. recently gathered in Tokyo to spread their message that capital punishment neither prevents crime nor comforts the victimized.

Executions instead violate the most basic of human rights, as the death penalty is fundamentally murder by the state that removes any chance for exoneration, the abolitionists said.

At the international symposium May 29 organized by Aoyama Gakuin University, the panelists, including ex-justice ministers from Japan and Norway, reviewed and compared the judicial and social responses to violent crimes in their countries.

Both have low crime rates and both have suffered indiscriminate terrorism. Japan in March 1995 saw the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by Aum Shinrikyo that left 13 people dead and thousands injured. Norway last July suffered its worst crime spree since World War II when Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb within Regjeringskvartalet, the executive government quarter, and two hours later went on rampage at a youth camp, gunning down 77 people.

Even though these crimes were both brutal, the panelists said each nation's public and judicial systems reacted to and handled them in almost completely opposite fashions.

In Norway, the most Breivik will likely get is 21 years in prison with the possibility of indefinite extension for as long as he is seen as a danger to society. Norway ended capital punishment for civilian crimes in 1902 and banned the practice completely in 1979 after briefly executing World War II Nazi collaborators.

While Breivik himself has called for reintroduction of the death penalty at his ongoing trial, Norwegian experts said there is little debate about reinstating the system as capital punishment is not an issue for most Norwegians, including his surviving victims and the families of the slain.

"The debates have centered on how we could have prevented such an act in the first place and what went wrong," said Knut Storbeget, who was Norway's minister of justice and police at the time of the massacre.

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Source: The Japan Times, June 9, 2012