The UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief formally requested on March 28, 2024, to visit Japan. Astonishingly, her request has not been accepted.
by Massimo Introvigne
Something very strange is happening with Japan. After United Nations criticism of its attitude towards the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious minorities, it seems that the Japanese government is trying to prevent an official visit to the country by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Nazila Ghanea.
On March 28, 2024, the Special Rapporteur officially requested to conduct a country visit to Japan. Her request is officially posted on the United Nations’ website (see screenshot above).
Yet, the visit has not been scheduled, which means that Japan did not agree to it. Japan is a democratic country and one that extended a standing invitation to Special Rapporteurs in 2011, yet in practice each visit should be confirmed to actually happen. This has not been the case for the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief’s March 2024 request.
If I may, I would add that I am familiar with the procedure as I was in 2011 the Representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for combating racism, xenophobia, and intolerance and discrimination against Christians and members of other religions. OSCE Representatives’ system of country visits was patterned after the one used by the UN Special Rapporteurs. I expressed my intention to visit certain countries (including, for the first time in OSCE history, the Vatican, which accepted) but needed their ad hoc invitation to actually go there.
Both OSCE and UN Representatives and Rapporteurs normally are unable to visit totalitarian and non-democratic countries. Almost nobody refuses the visits explicitly. The strategy used by those who have something to hide is what is called in diplomatic language “fin de non recevoir.” They simply delay the answer indefinitely.
Sometimes, however, even totalitarian states understand that they should allow such visits to save face. “Bitter Winter” covered the saga of the cat and mouse game between China and then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet about a visit to Xinjiang, which she requested in June 2018. After considerable international pressure, the visit happened in 2022. China used COVID as an excuse in 2020 and 2021, but there was no COVID lockdown in 2018 and 2019.
After the visits, Rapporteurs normally publish reports. After Bachelet’s visit to Xinjiang, China started lobbying against the publication of her report. She only released it on August 31, 2022, on the eve of the end of her term as High Commissioner. China managed to avoid the use of the word “genocide,” but was still unhappy that the report mentioned its “crimes against humanity.”
This recent precedent is very important. It shows that even China, while continuing to play its usual games, in the end realized that not allowing a high UN Human rights representative to visit the country was worse in terms of international reputation than having to confront a negative report.
Why is Japan putting itself in an even worse international position than China? The reason of course is that Ghanea co-signed on April 30, 2024, with Special Rapporteur on the right to education Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression Irene Khan, and Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association Clément Nyaletsossi Voule, a letter to Japan that mightily disturbed the local government. The Japanese government did submit a very weak response to the statement only on June 27.
The Rapporteurs’ letter clearly denounced that after the 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by a man who claimed he wanted to punish him for his cooperation with the Unification Church, which the assassin hated, the Japanese government adopted a series of measures targeting both the Unification Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (and potentially other religious groups). The Rapporteurs found that some measures “may constitute a violation of the principles of neutrality and non-discrimination, as well as potentially contributing to further stigmatization and suspicion of religious or belief minorities.” They also noted with concern that anti-cultists well-known for their vitriolic criticism of the targeted groups had cooperated with the government in drafting regulations.
In the meantime, the Japanese government is pursuing at the District Court of Tokyo a legal action seeking the dissolution of the Unification Church, now called Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. In Japan, a legal dissolution is a death sentence as it deprives the dissolved religious corporation of its assets and makes the continuation of its regular activities impossible in practice. Well-known specialized French attorney Patricia Duval has demonstrated that the action violates the international commitments of Japan under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Meanwhile, discrimination and even physical violence has continued against the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as against devotees of the Unification Church.
This is, as they say, hidden in plain sight in Japan. A visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief would underline that what is happening is not acceptable and add emphasis to a blame already expressed by many NGOs and international scholars. During the visit, it may also come out that Japanese authorities only interviewed disgruntled second-generation ex-members of the Unification Church while ignoring the thousands that reported positive experiences in the religious organization. They also ignored the positive social contributions of the reportedly “anti-social” church and its allied organizations, including through disaster relief after earthquakes and tsunamis. The visit may even examine the arbitrary actions of the Japanese authorities abroad, including against a school in Senegal funded by an organization connected with the Unification Church.
Japan can, of course, continue to refuse the visit. As somebody who admires so many features of Japan’s culture and rich religious heritage, I would, however, respectfully suggest to the Japanese authorities that continuing to prevent the visit from happening is worse for Japan’s reputation than anything Ghanea could say while visiting the country or in her report. It puts Japan dangerously close to egregious violators of human rights and freedom of religion or belief—which can run but cannot hide.
