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Japan rules out ending death penalty despite panel's call for review

The Japanese government on Thursday ruled out abolishing the death penalty, rejecting calls by domestic legal experts for a review amid international pressure to end executions.

"The government thinks it is not appropriate to abolish" the death penalty, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told a press conference. 

"The death penalty is unavoidable for a person who has committed an extremely grave and atrocious crime."

On Wednesday, a 16-member panel, including a former top prosecutor, a former top police official and academics, proposed to the Cabinet and parliament the establishment of a conference body to discuss whether to maintain the death penalty.

Citing the case of Iwao Hakamada, an 88-year-old man who spent nearly half a century on death row before being acquitted in a recent retrial over a 1966 quadruple murder, the panel's report said, "Once a mistake occurs, it takes a very long time to correct it."

The panel, set up in February with the Japan Federation of Bar Associations serving as its secretariat, also said abolishing the death penalty system is an international trend.

Japan and the United States are the only Group of Seven industrialized nations still handing down capital sentences. 

The European Union, which bars countries with the death penalty from joining, has been vocal in calling on Japan to review its stance.

At the end of 2023, 144 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or practice, according to the human rights organization Amnesty International, which has also urged Japan to end the system.

Source: kyodonews.net, Staff, November 14, 2024

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde



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