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Concept
Human rights in Japan
Summary
Japan is a constitutional monarchy. According to Ministry of Justice (MOJ) figures, the Japanese Legal Affairs Bureau offices and civil liberties volunteers dealt with 359,971 human rights related complaints and 18,786 reports of suspected human rights violations during 2003. Many of these cases were ultimately resolved in the court. Human rights issues occur in present-day Japan, as modernization history of Japan only reached in the non-humanity areas with the rise of military expansion of Empire of Japan in the 20th century.
The Human Rights Scores Dataverse ranked Japan somewhere the middle among G7 countries on its human rights performance, below Germany and Canada and above the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the United States. The Fragile States Index ranked Japan second last in the G7 after the United States on its "Human Rights and Rule of Law" sub-indicator.
Foreigners in Japan may face human-rights violations that Japanese citizens do not. In recent years, Western media has reported that Japanese firms frequently confiscate the passports of guest workers in Japan, particularly unskilled laborers from the Philippines and other poorer Asian countries. Critics call this practice, which is legal in Japan, coercive and a form of human trafficking.
Article 14 of the Japanese Constitution guarantees equality between the sexes. The percentage of women in full-time jobs grew steadily during the 1980s and early 1990s. The Diet's passage of the Law for Equal Opportunity in Employment for Men and Women in 1985 is of some help in securing women's rights, even though the law is a "guideline" and entails no legal penalties for employers who discriminate (see Working women in Japan).
Japan has a conviction rate of over 99%. In several cases, courts have acknowledged confessions were forced and released those imprisoned. To combat this, a law was passed in 2016 requiring some interrogations to be videotaped. However, this only applies to people accused of serious crimes, such as murder, arson and kidnapping, which make up only 3% of cases.
Official source
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