Japan hanged four prisoners on Christmas Day, including two men in their 70s, as the government ended a 15-month moratorium on the death penalty.
Yesterday's hangings were the first in the country since September last year, when one convicted murderer was executed. Japan is the only major industrialized country other than the US to practice the death penalty.
The death penalty is widely supported in Japan and analysts said the government wanted to carry out executions this year, which would have been the first year without any hangings since 1992.
But the timing was condemned by some members of the Christian community, which makes up one percent of the population in the largely Shinto and Buddhist country.
"It was such an insensitive act," said Makoto Suzuki, a Christian who is active in the anti-death penalty movement. "Christmas is the day to reaffirm humanity."
A justice ministry spokesman said four inmates were executed but citing government policy he refused to identify the prisoners or say where they were killed.
Japanese media said that the four included two of the oldest prisoners on death row -- convicted murderers Yoshimitsu Akiyama, 77, and Yoshio Fujinami, 75 -- who were both in jail in Tokyo.
The others were reported to be Hiroaki Hidaka, 44, a taxi driver in Hiroshima convicted of murdering a girl and three women and farmer Michio Fukuoka, 64, who killed three people, including his father-in-law and sister-in-law.
Japan effectively had a moratorium on the death penalty imposed by former justice minister Seiken Sugiura, who served from October last year until September. He said executions went against his Buddhist beliefs.
He was replaced three months ago by Jinen Nagase when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office. By law the justice minister has to sign off on executions.
"I think they had a political motivation, from the public security point of view, to carry these out within the year so as not to end the year without a single execution," said Asaho Mizushima, a law professor at Waseda University.
"Japanese courts are tending to impose harsher penalties, while public sentiment is becoming more tolerant for heavier punishment under the hawkish Abe government," said Mizushima, a death penalty opponent.
"They did the executions at the last minute [before the year ends] to balance out the time of the former justice minister," he said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS