Human Rights Protection Bill Expired

The 157th extraordinary session of the Diet was dissolved on October 10. The Human Rights Protection Bill, which envisaged the establishment of the national human rights commission, subsequently automatically expired.

The Human Rights Protection Bill was first submitted by the Government to the Diet in March 2002. While the Bill was among the agendas of the Diet, it was never substantially discussed due to the prioritizing of other bills, such as the amendment of the Special Measures Law to fight Terrorism.

The opinions of the ruling coalition and the opposition parties concerning the Bill differed too much to allow continuous deliberation of the Bill. Whereas opposition parties took the assault against inmates by prison officers seriously and opposed the establishment of the national human rights commission as an external body of the Ministry of Justice, the ruling coalition failed to make any concessions.

The Central Steering Committee of the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Policy organized a gathering on September 30, against the strong likelihood of the dissolution of the Diet, and agreed upon the future strategies to establish a truly independent national human rights commission in line with the Paris Principles. These strategies included the encouragement of the local initiatives to support the development of effective institutions to provide compensation to victims of human rights violations.

Source: Kaiho Shimbun (Liberation News) No. 2140, October 13, 2003 and Mainichi Shimbun (newspaper) September 26, 2003.