Background
In October, Sanae Takaichi, known for her conservative values, was chosen as Japan’s first female prime minister.
Death penalty
On 27 June, a 29-year-old man convicted of nine murders was executed by hanging – the first execution in Japan in nearly three years. Human rights organizations widely condemned the execution.
Discrimination
In July, Japan held elections for the upper house of parliament. There was widespread use of exclusionist rhetoric during election campaigns, accompanied by xenophobic and discriminatory comments on the streets and online against women, transgender people and foreigners. Human rights NGOs, including Amnesty International Japan, criticized the campaigns for inciting xenophobia, hate speech and misinformation about foreign nationals and minorities in Japan.
Rights of people with disabilities
On 17 January, Japan enacted a law offering compensation to victims of forced sterilization. Sterilization and abortion surgeries were performed without consent on an estimated 84,000 individuals who, it was deemed, would produce “defective offspring” under the 1948 eugenic protection law, including individuals with disabilities. The new compensation law followed the Supreme Court decision in July 2024 that declared the eugenics law unconstitutional, and included an apology from the government in its preamble. Many victims struggled to gather the evidence required for their claims, such as old medical records. By the end of November, only 1,560 claims had been approved. Victims’ groups highlighted that some people did not even know that the surgery had been performed on them.
Refugees’ and migrants’ rights
Japan’s “Zero Plan” for immigration, released in May, described plans to enforce immigration law by fast-tracking deportations, among other measures. The plan aimed to cut in half the number of overstaying foreign nationals by 2030. Human rights advocates criticized the focus on the number of deportations and argued that the policy potentially endangered individuals seeking asylum. The law continued to allow immigration detention centres to detain people arbitrarily and indefinitely, in violation of international law.
In December, Japan forcibly repatriated Mustafa Khalil, a Pakistani national from Kashmir who had been detained for a cumulative total of 12 and a half years and whose health was in severe decline.
Japan continued to deny responsibility for the death of Wishma Sandamali, a Sri Lankan asylum seeker who died in an immigration detention centre in the city of Nagoya in 2021. In February, the family brought a second lawsuit against the government demanding the release of full video footage surrounding her death. The government cited the privacy rights of the deceased and a lack of resources to process video footage, among other reasons, to continue to deny access to the footage.
Right to a healthy environment
Japan continued to drive fossil gas (known as liquefied natural gas, LNG) extraction projects overseas, undermining global efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and endangering the rights of fence-line communities.
In July, hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in Canada filed a formal objection to the state-owned Japan Bank of International Cooperation and the Mitsubishi Corporation to demand an end to the two entities’ financing of the LNG Canada project, which was harming the climate and Indigenous Peoples’ rights.
The Japan-USA summit on 7 February included an agreement to expand American LNG exports to Japan, as well as plans to move forward with a new LNG extraction project in Alaska, USA. The move incited criticism by climate and human rights groups for its potential impact on the climate and on the rights of the Indigenous Gwich’in People.
Government-supported “green energy” projects abroad were criticized as hindering a just transition to renewable energy. Six climate and civil society groups in Indonesia wrote to the Japan International Cooperation Agency demanding that it stop its projects in LNG, carbon capture and coal firing with hydrogen and ammonia. The groups claimed that the projects were imposing false climate solutions on Indonesia, prolonging reliance on fossil fuels and harming local communities.
Indigenous Peoples’ rights
On 12 May, the CERD Committee sent an early warning letter in relation to the construction of a new US military base in Okinawa prefecture, highlighting the impact on the rights to health and to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment of the Indigenous People of Ryukyu/Okinawa.
LGBTI people’s rights
In March, the high courts of the cities of Nagoya and Osaka ruled that the denial of same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Five high courts in Japan had passed a similar ruling. However, in November, the high court of Tokyo ruled that the denial did not violate the Constitution. This verdict was a step backwards in a series of high court rulings that raised hopes for legalization of same-sex marriage.
In September, the family court of the city of Sapporo became the first to rule that the “appearance requirement”, which required transgender people to alter the appearance of their genitals to change their legal gender, was unconstitutional.
