TOKYO: Japan on Tuesday executed three prisoners on death row, the first since December 2019, local media reported citing unnamed sources including from the justice ministry.
The executions were the first under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who took office in October and won a general election the same month.
Japan, where more than 100 inmates await execution, is one of the few developed nations that still have the death penalty.
Public support for capital punishment remains high despite international criticism, including from rights groups.
The country executed three inmates in 2019 and 15 in 2018 — including 13 from the Aum Shinrikyo cult that carried out a fatal 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
Executions are usually implemented long after sentencing, always by hanging.
Deputy chief cabinet secretary Seiji Kihara declined to comment on the reported executions at a regular briefing on Tuesday.
“Whether to keep the death sentence system or not is an important issue that concerns the foundation of Japan’s criminal justice system,” he said.
For decades, authorities have told death row inmates just hours before an execution is carried out — a process that two inmates argue is illegal and causes psychological distress.
The pair are suing the government over the system, and are also seeking compensation of 22 million yen ($194,000) for the distress caused by living with uncertainty about their execution date.
Documents and news archives show that Japan used to give death row inmates more notice, but stopped around 1975.
In December 2020, Japan’s top court overturned a ruling blocking the retrial of a man described as the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, raising new hope for the now 85-year-old.
Iwao Hakamada has lived under a death sentence for more than half a century after being convicted of robbing and murdering his boss, the man’s wife, and their two teenaged children.
But he and his supporters say he confessed to the crime only after an allegedly brutal police interrogation that included beatings, and that evidence in the case was planted.
Also last December, a man dubbed the “Twitter killer” was sentenced to death for murdering and dismembering nine people he met on the social media platform.
Japan executes three on death row, first since 2019: media
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Japan executes three on death row, first since 2019: media
- Japan is one of the few developed nations that still have the death penalty
- More than 100 inmates await execution
Archbishop of York says he was ‘intimidated’ by Israeli militias during West Bank visit
- “We were … intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” the archbishop said
LONDON: The Archbishop of York has revealed that he felt “intimidated” by Israeli militias during a visit to the Holy Land this year.
“We were stopped at various checkpoints and intimidated by Israeli militias who told us that we couldn’t visit Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” the Rev. Stephen Cottrell told his Christmas Day congregation at York Minster.
The archbishop added: “We have become — and really, I can think of no other way of putting it — we have become fearful of each other, and especially fearful of strangers, or just people who aren’t quite like us.
“We don’t seem to be able to see ourselves in them, and therefore we spurn our common humanity.”
He recounted how YMCA charity representatives in Bethlehem, who work with persecuted Palestinian communities in the West Bank, gave him an olive wood Nativity scene carving.
The carving depicted a “large gray wall” blocking the three kings from getting to the stable to see Mary, Joseph and Jesus, he said.
He said it was sobering for him to see the wall in real life during his visit.
He continued: “But this Christmas morning here in York, as well as thinking about the walls that divide and separate the Holy Land, I’m also thinking of all the walls and barriers we erect across the whole of the world and, perhaps most alarming, the ones we build around ourselves, the ones we construct in our hearts and minds, and of how our fearful shielding of ourselves from strangers — the strangers we encounter in the homeless on our streets, refugees seeking asylum, young people starved of opportunity and growing up without hope for the future — means that we are in danger of failing to welcome Christ when he comes.”
