Secrets bill must not become law

November 27, 2013

EDITORIAL: Secrets protection bill must not be allowed to become law

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/editorial/AJ201311270048

In what can only be termed the power of the majority in the wrong hands, the ruling coalition railroaded the state secrets protection bill though the Lower House on Nov. 26.

We seriously question the Abe administration's perception of democracy and fundamental human rights.

The dangers posed by this bill have been pointed out by news organizations as well as legal experts, constitutional scholars, historians and numerous concerned citizens groups. As the nature of this bill became more widely known, public opinion also began to turn increasingly against it.

And let us not forget that only the day before the bill cleared the Lower House, it received the thumbs-down from all seven panelists who had been invited to state their opinions at a public hearing held in the city of Fukushima.

Yet, the ruling coalition simply rammed the bill through the chamber in blatant disregard of the will of the people and the opposition camp's call for further deliberation.

As we have repeatedly pointed out, the most dangerous aspect of this legislation is that it is designed to keep the public in the dark about what the government has designated as state secrets for protection. This means that any reason for information to remain a secret will itself remain a secret, thereby breeding more secrets, ad infinitum, without the public's knowledge.

SECRECY TO BE JEALOUSLY GUARDED

The designation of massive volumes of information as state secrets will be effectively left to the discretion of bureaucrats. This would obviously require the presence of an independent organ that is empowered to constantly monitor the legitimacy of each designation, determine how long designated information ought to remain withheld, and order changes to be made as needed. However, such an organ is unlikely to be created under the state secrets protection legislation.

The government has a duty to promise the sovereign populace that today's state secrets will be eventually declassified. But the proposed legislation is full of loopholes that will enable the government to keep them secret even after 60 years, or simply scrap them quietly.

This is how the bureaucracy will jealously guard its secrecy.

And there will be stiff penalties for conscientious civil servants who decide to blow the whistle, or journalists and ordinary citizens who try to find out the truth.

A healthy balance must exist between the government's authority to control information and the public's right to know.

Japan's information disclosure system is still underdeveloped. To enact this state secrets protection legislation now would only tip the balance even more heavily in the government's favor.

STATE COMES FIRST

The Global Principles on National Security and the Right to Information, or the Tshwane Principles for short, were drawn up in June in Tshwane, South Africa. The process took two years and involved more than 500 security and human rights experts from over 70 countries and regions. Organizations that were involved include the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Around the world, a growing number of countries are now bolstering their secrets protection laws as a way to combat terrorism, and Tshwane Principles offer guidelines on information control.

The 50-point principles recognize that the public authorities may restrict the public's right of access to information on national security grounds, but they also require the public authorities to clearly specify the duration of classification. The principles also require oversight bodies to have legally guaranteed access to all information, and exempt from punishment anyone who is not a public servant.

Japan's state secrets protection bill violates the Tshwane Principles in every way.

In the Diet session, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said it was vital to have a law to protect state secrets that is comparable with those of the United States and European nations.

But he dismissed the Tshwane Principles as unimportant, claiming they were "issued by a private organ" and have not been "authorized" as international principles.

Not only Abe, but most individuals speaking on behalf of the government and the ruling coalition have made it amply clear that the interests of the state must come before those of the people.

Former Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura asserted, "It makes no logical sense at all to guarantee the people's right to know and not be able to guarantee the survival of individuals and the state."

Machimura's assertion is tantamount to blackmail against the people. We wholeheartedly agree that national security is of vital importance. But Machimura clearly has no understanding whatsoever that there is no democracy without the public's right to know.

GOING AGAINST GLOBAL TREND

The impracticality of implementing what the state secrets protection bill purports to set in place has become amply clear from the series of Diet debates we have heard so far.

Under the government's bylaws, there are currently 420,000 "specially controlled secrets" pertaining to diplomacy and national security. The government claims there will be fewer secrets under the new legislation, but there is no doubt that the number will be in the order of hundreds of thousands.

How are the prime minister and the Cabinet ministers going to check them all? A supplemental provision of the amendment bill, submitted by the ruling coalition and the opposition Japan Restoration Party and Your Party, proposes to consider the establishment of a new organ that will examine and oversee the criteria by which information may be classified as state secrets.

Abe referred to such an organ before the Diet on Nov. 26, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will be created.

Just getting a panel of experts to examine the criteria will

definitely not prevent arbitrary classification of information as state secrets. Nor will it eliminate the likelihood of government ministries and agencies taking advantage of the legislation to hide inconvenient information.

If an independent oversight organ is to be established, it must be staffed with enough people to handle massive volumes of state secrets and be given the authority to demand the declassification of privileged information.

What the government is trying to do with this new legislation runs completely counter to today's global current in the maintenance and disclosure of state secrets as well as its obligation to respect people's rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The debate will move to the Upper House. This bill must never be allowed to become law.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 27

Editorial: More discussion needed to prevent state secrets bill from destroying democracy

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/perspectives/news/20131127p2a00m0na004000c.html

The ruling coalition's ramming of a controversial special state secrets bill, which would impose harsh penalties on those who leak classified government information, through the House of Representatives on Nov. 26 has stunned the public.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was absent from the chamber's special committee on national security when it approved the bill. Since the voting session was aired live, the ruling coalition comprised of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the New Komeito party reportedly decided not to show the public that it rammed the bill through in the presence of the prime minister.

This has suggested that even the ruling bloc cannot take pride in the passage of the bill through the powerful chamber. During a public hearing in Fukushima the previous day, all the attendees demanded that the bill be either scrapped or deliberated cautiously. However, such desperate calls from the area affected by the nuclear crisis did not reach the legislative branch of the government.

The bill cleared the lower house after only 20 days of deliberations. The bill does not clearly show the scope of information that could be classified as special state secrets, and the legislative and judicial branches cannot check classified government information. Moreover, a decision on rules on releasing declassified information will be made sometime later.

Ensuring that members of the public can access government information is one of the key basics of a democratic society. However, if the bill is to be enacted and come into force, it could discourage citizens as well as journalists from seeking access to such information for fear of harsh punishment, blocking government information from circulating in society. The Diet failed to thoroughly deliberate the bill to clarify these problems. Flaws in the bill are beginning to surface one after another.

The prime minister failed to provide a sufficient explanation of the bill during the campaign for the House of Councillors election in July this year and made no mention of the legislation in his policy speech at the outset of the ongoing Diet session. Nevertheless, the Abe administration is now taking a tough line in a bid to ensure the bill becomes law during the current Diet session that ends on Dec. 6. This highlights the arrogance that the ruling coalition is now showing only four months after it regained a majority in the upper chamber, which had been controlled by opposition parties, in the July poll.

A few opposition parties further tainted the issue by reaching a compromise with the government over the bill in an easy-going manner. An agreement that the coalition reached with the Japan Restoration Party (JRP) and Your Party to revise the bill has not changed its core elements at all. The ruling bloc agreed to consider setting up a third-party organization to examine whether the government's classification of internal information as special secrets is appropriate, as demanded by the JRP, but stopped short of pledging to establish such an independent panel.

As a result of their negotiations, some clauses of the bill have even worsened, such as the extension of the maximum period during which government information could be classified as special secrets to 60 years. As such, these parties could be regarded as nothing but forces complementary to the ruling parties.

Although the bill cleared the lower house, legislators should scrutinize whether such legislation is truly necessary once again.

It is understandable for the government to classify information that could pose a threat to national security over a certain period.

Currently, the National Public Service Act, the Self-Defense Forces Act and the legislation on the protection of secrets regarding the U.S. and Japan Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement specifically outlaw leaks of government information. Those who leak confidential information face up to one, five and 10 years in prison, respectively, under these laws.

The government has officially confirmed that there have been five serious cases in which public servants leaked classified information over the past 15 years. Defendants in these cases either evaded indictment or were handed prison terms far shorter than the maximum terms provided for under these three laws.

The government should place priority on creating systems in all the administrative organs to prevent confidential information from leaking and ensure all officials abide by the rules on information management.

Under the bill, information on defense, diplomacy and national security as well as that regarding the prevention of terrorist attacks could be classified as special state secrets. Investigations into offenses that have disrupted public security -- which center on surveillance activity -- could restrict the human rights of members of the public.

Serious questions remain as to whether such new legislation should be created even if it raises the possibility that citizens will be punished for attempting to gain access to government information.

The bill would neither sufficiently guarantee people's right to know nor establish a system to check information designated as secrets. There are numerous other problems with the bill.

The upper house should hold thorough discussions to highlight problems involving the bill instead of making haste to pass it into law, and clearly show the danger that the bill poses to the public.