Freedom of information in Japan: Secreted away

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

ONE of the arguments against Japan’s new secrecy law, which the lower house of the Diet passed on November 26th, came from the chief of a company helping to decommission the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Tighter control of information, said Yukiteru Naka, could frighten nuclear-plant workers into keeping quiet about safety risks. Strong objections also came from the public via the internet, from newspapers afraid of being muzzled and from freedom-of-information advocates.

None of this stopped the government passing the controversial law pretty much intact. Efforts have been made in the past to enact secrecy legislation, but until now the malign memory of the wartime secret police has blocked serious moves. As luck would have it for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the vote came just after China announced a new air-defence zone on November 23rd, highlighting how vital was Japan’s national security.

Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, insists that the secrecy bill is an essential underpinning for a new national security council. The council is meant to centralise intelligence and speed decision-making among ministries. That Japan has no proper secrecy law, says Yosuke Isozaki, one of Mr Abe’s aides, hampers intelligence-sharing with friends. America in particular has long complained that Japanese officials leak information passed to them. It welcomes the new law.

Should the bill pass the upper house by December, as expected, a long list of ministries and agencies will be able to designate what counts as a state secret in three broad fields other than defence: diplomacy, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism (the latter category would include information on nuclear plants). Japan currently treats leakers more leniently than other countries do. Only members of the Self-Defence Forces face tough sanctions, of five years in prison, for leaking defence secrets, or ten years for leaking information gleaned from Japan’s security pact with America. Civil servants face a maximum of just one year in prison.

The new regime will raise that to ten years, and it will apply to senior politicians as well as bureaucrats. Journalists, too, would get up to five years for extracting secrets using “inappropriate” methods, such as buying information.

Threatened with such sanctions, Japan’s usually tame news media have gone on the attack. The Nihon Shinbun Kyokai, a press lobby, warns that the government and bureaucrats may use the law to hide inconvenient information—an honourable Japanese tradition. The press is likely to stop asking hard questions, and bureaucrats may stop talking entirely, some say. The overall result, says Yoshioka Shinobu, director of the Japan PEN club, which defends writers’ rights, is that the public will have less information. In particular, he says, anti-nuclear campaigns could in future be constrained.

Some concessions in the bill were expected. The government has agreed to restrict the period over which the majority of information remains off-limits, to 60 years rather than for ever. But elsewhere critics failed to get their way. An independent review board was proposed to decide what should be made secret and what should stay in the public domain. In the end, with a comfortable majority in the lower house and a weak opposition, an illiberal government was able to keep the bill largely intact. As it stands, the law currently pledges only to consider establishing an oversight body.

One natural restraint on the new regime, argues Yasuo Hasebe, a constitutional scholar at the University of Tokyo, is that if ministries lock away too much information, the government will function less effectively. The government also claims that the scope of undisclosed material will not expand, since most state secrets will be chosen from material that is already confidential. Currently, says Mr Isozaki, ministries and agencies guard about 420,000 secrets. Between 300,000 and 400,000 of those will become state secrets, subject to the tough new penalties. There will be rules on what each ministry may designate as a state secret. But for many people, that will be scant reassurance. Until recently even the secrecy bill was itself highly secret. Last month, when the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper asked for details of the draft law, it was sent documents with the contents entirely blacked out.

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