Discriminations Guilty

The court decided that discrimination was unlawful. Kyoto District Court on Monday ordered a “hate speech” group to pay Kyoto Korean School ¥11 million as the compensation for disturbing classes by noisy demonstrations crying out discriminative words to the school. Denying the group’s reasoning that their appeal was within a realm of freedom of speech, the court regarded their activities as against International Convention on the Elimination of Racial discrimination adopted by the United Nations in 1965. However, people need to be careful of limitation on freedom of speech.

The group, Citizens against Special Privilege for Koreans in Japan, reiterated demonstration around the school between December, 2009, and March, 2010, chanting “Exclude Korean schools from Japan,” “They are kids of spies,” and so on. They also uploaded video of their demonstrations on internet. The court acknowledged those were acts of discrimination against Koreans. The amount of penalty was relatively high, indicating the court’s serious concern.

Basic concepts of the group is to eliminate all the privileges preferable for Koreans in Japan, which include special status of permanent citizenship, preferable application of public assistance, and official use of assumed Japanese name. But their demonstrations on the streets in cities have been excessively aggressive, chanting “Bring massacre of them” or “Get out of Japan.” Although collisions between hate speeches and anti-hate speeches are getting increased, Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, has been reluctant to take effective measures, expecting those conservative movements would positively work for his policies.

Significance of the court decision was that it recognized discriminative demonstrations and uploading of video as joint tort-feasors, and as caused to disturb school management and defamation of character. The court therefore raised responsibility of the group, posing a penalty. It is reasonable to understand the decision as a measure to deter further aggression of human rights in Koreans in Japan.

Having said that, it is questionable that a court intensively stepped into limitation of freedom of speech, even if it was for preventing excessive use of the right. Although there is an argument for legal limit of hate speech, it would be concerned that the government tightens the restriction against freedom of speech, namely in this conservative administration. The biggest responsibility of the discriminative group would be to have given the government a cause of further limiting human rights.