Fake Transparency of Interrogation

Believe or not, policemen in Japan have been fabricating record of interrogation to arrested suspects for many years. They created a story of crime and applied the suspect to its context. If the suspect would reject the story, he or she is going to be detained for a long time, regarded as uncooperative to the police. If admitted, the penalty would be posed anyway. This is how false accusations have been made. Ministry of Justice at last embarked on its effort to introduce transparence in interrogation. However, it is not crystal clear whether it can be really transparent.

Council of Legislation, a consultative committee of Minister of Justice, made a proposal that all interrogation through the process from arrest to prosecution must basically be recorded by some kind of electric devices. However, it is usual behavior for bureaucrats to make restrictions on them meaningless by inserting a lot of exceptions.

They proposed two options. Plan A is to record all interrogations by police and prosecutor in cases, which will fall into trials with public judges. Public judge system is introduced years ago, in which ordinary citizens attend in decision making. Trials with public judge system actually occupy only 3% of all cases. The rest of cases, 97% of all indeed, may not be recorded.

Plan B is applying to all interrogations by prosecutors, in addition to plan A. What does that mean? Police can still exempted from recording mandate in 97% of cases. Police are highly reluctant in transparency of interrogation, because they supposedly make deals with suspects such as mafia members or activists with underground organizations. There are a bunch of secrets in their interrogation.

Not only making new transparency policy useless, judicial bureaucrats proposed extension of investigation method. It included expanding the object of wiretapping from four kinds of crime cases to fourteen. Judicial bargaining, which reduces penalty of criminal who revealed information important to investigation. Such deal was long prohibited in judicial system in Japan.

Those proposals intensively ignore the reason why transparency of interrogation matters. The discussion started after prosecutors office fabricated evidence of false management of a bureau chief in Ministry of Health and Labor and forced the bureau chief preferable confessions. That accepted sharp accusations of the nation toward law enforcement sections in the government. In recent years, there appeared same kind of cases of prisoners with death penalty. Fabrication of interrogation has to be realized as traditional conspiracy of Japanese police and prosecutors. It is a sense of human rights in Japan that is tested.