Antagonism against Reporters

Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito agreed on a draft of Specific Secret Protection Act on Tuesday. The Cabinet led by Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is going to decide it as an official bill and submit it to the Diet. However, it is unclear whether the bill will pass it, because opposite parties are firmly criticizing its character of restricting freedom of speech. Although the bill looks like taking care of the freedom, concerns of people keeps on growing.

Agreed draft of the bill includes new concept of “specific secret,” which is needed to be protected from leaking for avoiding disturbance on national security. If a government official leaks specific secret, he/she will be imprisoned for ten years at most. With request from New Komeito, they added a provision that describes acknowledgement on freedom of report and interview to government officials in order to benefit the people’s right of accessing information. It is to preserve opportunities of reporters to access government officials for news reports.

The draft has two problems at least. The first is that the government recognizes information as something possessed by the government. Under democracy, the people basically have the right to access all the information their government has. In other words, information is possessed by the people, not the government. In this country with strong power of bureaucrats, however, the government always tries to occupy all the information. As long as this idea prevails in the government, no true democracy settles.

The second is that the government thinks reporters as enemies of them. The bill is mainly to protect security information from harmful leaking for maintaining alliance with the United States and some others. Bureaucrats supposedly took advantage of this opportunity to restrict reporters not to disturb their jobs. Scandal reports among bureaucracy have caused degradation or resignation of government staffs, for regrets of bureaucrats. While politics have been acknowledging the value of such reports, politics demanding tighter security on information and bureaucrats demanding tighter security on reporters matched this time.

The draft regards interview with no illegal activity as appropriate. However, it is the government, not the people, who decides the illegality of an interview. There is no guarantee of preserving rule of law, which is the basic concept of legal democracy.

The government will submit the bill next Friday. With overall majority in both Houses, the bill is likely to pass the Diet in this session. But, opposite parties are strongly protesting the bill as violation of freedom of speech. Considering the bill as important issue, both Houses are reserving enough time to discuss it. So, it still is unclear for the bill to pass by the end of the session, December 6^th.

The problem is mixing penalty for the government officials with restriction of reporting. If Abe wants to enhance credibility on management of shared information by the government of Japan, he needs to take stricter attitude on bureaucrats. It is not impossible for the government to enhance information security without eroding democracy.