Many
issues of national importance to Japan, probably including the state
of the Fukushima power plant, may be designated state secrets under a
new draft law. Once signed, it could see whistleblowers jailed for up
to 10 years.
Japan
has relatively lenient penalties for exposing state secrets compared
to many other nations, but that may change with the introduction of
the new law. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government has agreed on
draft legislation on the issue on Friday and expects the parliament
to vote on it during the current session, which ends on December 6.
With
a comfortable majority in both chambers, the ruling coalition bloc
would see no problems overcoming the opposition. Critics say the new
law would give the executive too much power to conceal information
from the public and compromise the freedom of the press.
Currently
only issues of defense can be designated state secret in Japan, and
non-military leakers face a jail term of up to one year. Defense
officials may be sentenced to five years for exposing secrets, or 10
years, if the classified information they leaded came from the US
military.
The
new law would enact harsher punishment to leakers, but more
importantly, it would allow government branches other than defense
ministry designate information as state secrets. The bill names four
categories of ‘special secrets’, which would be covered by
protection – defense, diplomacy, counter-terrorism and
counter-espionage.
Under
the new legislation a ministry may classify information for a
five-year term with a possibility of prolongation to up to 30 years.
After that a cabinet ruling would be needed for the secret to be
treated as such, but there is no limit for how long information may
be kept under a lid.
"Basically,
this bill raises the possibility that the kind of information about
which the public should be informed is kept secret eternally,"
Tadaaki Muto, a lawyer and member of a task force on the bill at the
Japan Federation of Bar Associations, told Reuters.
"Under
the bill, the administrative branch can set the range of information
that is kept secret at its own discretion."
Media
watchdogs in Japan fear the bill would allow the government to cover
up serious blunders, like the collusion between regulators and
utilities, which was a significant factor in the 2011 Fukushima
nuclear disaster. The quake- and tsunami-hit nuclear power plant went
into meltdown and continues to leak contaminated water as its
operator TEPCO failed to contain it.
TEPCO
has long been accused of obscuring the crisis and Fukushima. Many
details on its development were first published in the media before
going to governmental or corporate reports.
Critics
of the state secrets bill say it would undermine media’s ability to
act as the public’s eye on the actions of the government and
whoever it would choose to shield.
"It
seems very clear that the law would have a chilling effect on
journalism in Japan," said Lawrence Repeta, a law professor
at Meiji University.
In
a bid to address those concerns the cabinet added a provision to the
draft which gives "utmost considerations" to citizens'
right to know and freedom of the press. The addition came at the
request of the New Komeito party, the coalition partner of Abe's
Liberal Democratic Party. The added provisions also state that news
reporting is legitimate if its purpose is to serve the public good
and the information is not obtained in unlawful or extremely unjust
ways.
The
clause is based on the 1970s scandal in Japan, in which a reporter
was charged and found guilty of unlawfully obtaining secret
information about the government. The reporter, Takichi Nishiyama,
revealed a secret US-Japanese pact under which Tokyo paid some $4
million of the cost of transferring Okinawa Island from the US back
to Japanese rule in 1972.
Nishiyama’s
report, which was revealed to have been truthful in 2000, was based
on documents he received from a married Foreign Ministry clerk with
whom he had an affair. The scandal ultimately ruined his career and
dealt a serious blow to the newspaper he worked for.
Japanese
law has no clear definition of what kind of new gathering could be
deemed ‘grossly inappropriate’. The bill introduces a jail
sentence of up to five years for non-officials, including media
professionals, using such methods to obtain information. But it does
not clearly state that if a journalist reporting on a state secret is
found to have obtained the information legitimately, he or she would
not be punished. This has led critics to dismiss the ‘freedom of
press’ provisions as political window dressing.
Despite
criticisms, the Japanese cabinet insists that the law be adopted
promptly. It is needed to the planned establishment of a national
security council, which would involve members from different
ministries and agencies. The law would protect information exchanged
through the new body from being leaked, the government says.
Abe's
party has sought unsuccessfully to enact a harsher law on state
secrets in the past. The effort had been given a boost after a
leaking of a video in 2010, which showed a collision between a
Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese patrol vessel near disputed isles
in the East China Sea. The government led by the now-opposition
Democratic Party wanted to keep the video under wraps, fearing that
its publication would harm the already tense relations with Beijing.
Japan
had harsh state secret legislations before and during World War II,
so in the post-war period government secrecy has been viewed with
suspicion, along with militaristic traditions and other things
associated with the Imperial past. Abe’s LDP is among the political
circles in Japan, which seek change to some of those policies.
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