April 25, 2012
Yuko Mori
Member, House of Councillors
Former Senior Vice Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
Demand to Hold a Closed Session of the Justice Committee to Investigate the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution
Mr. Takahiro Yokomichi, Speaker, House of Representatives
Mr. Kenji Hirata, President, House of Councillors
To uphold the principles of parliamentary democracy, we make the following demands of the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the House of Councillors.
We demand that both Houses hold a closed session of their respective Justice Committees to investigate the management of the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution. We request that the required instructions be issued to those concerned.
Reason for this demand:
(1) According to the Act on Committee for Inquest of Prosecution, Article 3, the committee has independent authority. However, there is no law to specify which of the three branches of state has jurisdiction over the committee. As a result, although the committee is able to exercise extremely strong administrative authority by issuing orders for "forced indictments" as a result of the powers of indictment invested in the committee by an amendment of the Act, no-one is in a position to take responsibility for such indictments, a situation that many legal experts have identified as possibly unconstitutional.
Further, as Article 26 of the same Act legislates that the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution proceedings should be carried out in secret, it is essentially impossible to examine whether decisions to force an indictment were reached by following the appropriate legal procedures.
(2) In addition to the above general shortcomings, the case ofIchiro Ozawa, a member of the House of Representatives now on trial in a criminal case resulting from such a forced indictment, has revealed unbelievable behavior by prosecutors, namely the
falsification, by Prosecutor Masahiro Tashiro of the Special Investigative Department of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office, of the investigation report submitted to the fifth Tokyo Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution. The falsified portion the report was the principal reason behind the forced indictment, and we believe that this alone is enough to render the forced indictment invalid. It is also now clear that Prosecutor Tashiro engaged in other illegal activities including the use of incentives to influence witness testimony, actions which have been severely criticized by the judge.
(3) In the first place, the fifth Tokyo Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution that ordered the forced indictment of Ozawa went through various problems in the selection of its members including repeated mistakes by the committee secretariat in calculating the average age of the ll committee members, a major failure that resulted in three separate announcements. Furthermore, when announcing the average age of two separate groups of ll randomly selected members of the public, the secretariat announced the average age of both groups to be 34.55, identical down to two decimal points, an extreme statistical unlikelihood. Other issues include problems with the software for random committee member selection. As such, the public have major misgivings about the fairness of committee member selection, a crucial issue under the Act on Committee for Inquest of Prosecution.
(4) Due to the extremely limited nature of information disclosed, there have even been repeated protests, including large demonstrations and meetings, by members of the public who have doubts over whether the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution actually met at all.
(5) It has also been pointed out that an interview with prosecutors as required under the Act on Committee for Inquest of Prosecution, Article 41.6, Paragraph 2, was not carried out in accordance with regulations.
The Act on Committee for Inquest of Prosecution does not allow for a designated lawyer prosecuting the case to withdraw the indictments, nor does it allow the defendant to challenge the validity of the forced indictment resolution. Clearly, these are defects and omissions in the Act. Not addressing these issues would constitute a failure to act on the part of the legislature. This situation requires immediate investigation. In order to carry out an investigation while respecting the non-public and independent nature of the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution, the only possible method is a closed-session of the Justice Committee in both Houses, and we therefore make the above demands.