After trying to bribe officials of other countries to back their sick little games and gearing up to kill and capture dolphins, Japan has enacted another atrocity. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, who exposed widespread corruption in the Japanese whaling industry, were given a one-year suspended sentence. At the same time, the criminals behind the whale meat embezzlement walked free.
The politically motivated and unjust sentence has brought the eyes of the world once again on Japan and its treatment of cetaceans.
The pair intercepted one of numerous boxes of whale meat embezzled from the whaling programme as evidence. These boxes were taken for private use by the crew of the Nisshin Maru whaling ship in violation of the whaling programme's regulations, and this amounts to a misuse of public funds.
After two years of living under bail conditions, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were convicted with trespass and theft. It seems that animal welfare, democracy and free speech mean little these days in Japan, especially when money is involved.
Junichi said... "While the court acknowledged that there were questionable practices in the whaling industry, it did not recognise the right to expose these, as is guaranteed under international law. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, on which our defence was based, supersedes domestic criminal law, but the judgment did not properly take this into account."
Japan has already drawn criticism from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention for its treatment of Junichi and Toru, and as Professor Dirk Voorhoof, an international law expert and defence witness in the case, said...
"This conviction is very likely to earn Japan more criticism for its failure to respect its obligations under international human rights law."
Vigils are being held at Japanese embassies around the world and hundreds of thousands of people have already signed a Greenpeace petition calling for justice. The case has already been taken up by Amnesty International, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and by celebrities like Bryan Adams and Benicio Del Torro.
The good that will come of this is that the international community and lay-people all over the world will see the corruption, spinelessness and downright cowardice of the Japanese courts - people totally without honour.
Industry whistleblowers have continued to speak with Japanese media about corruption and wrongdoing in the whaling industry, and interest in the story keeps growing. In the last fortnight articles in major newspapers such as Tokyo Shimbun and Kyodo have covered the issue. Japanese journalists are growing more and more interested in the corruption and underhandedness in what is a tax-funded industry.
You can help the Tokyo Two by telling the Japanese foreign minister just how disgusted you are at the corruption in Japan’s courts.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/whaling/ending-japanese-whaling/whale-meat-scandal/Activism-is-not-a-crime-Write-to-Japans-Foreign-Minister/
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