Japan: Human rights: open letter to the Prime Minister

On 18 August 1993 Amnesty International wrote to Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro and Minister of Justice Mikazuki Akira, setting out the organizations’s human rights concerns and urging the new Japanese government to give urgent consideration to human rights issues. In particular it called on the government to ratify the two Optional Protocols to the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture; to provide safeguards against ill-treatment for all detainees, particularly those in police detention facilities, known as “substitute prisons”, daiyo kangoku; to abolish the death penalty and to end the ill-treatment of prisoners sentenced to death; and to provide adequate protection for refugees and asylum-seekers.

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