Patricia Duval
2024年9月25日
The executive summary of a report submitted to various United Nations personalities and institutions, presented in Geneva on September 25, 2024. 2024年9月25日にジュネーブで発表された、国連のさまざまな人物や機関に提出された報告書の要約
In 2013, members of the Unification Church (now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) who had been subjected to abduction and coercion to recant their faith (“deprogramming”) sent a detailed report to various United Nations human rights bodies to expose the outrageous violations they had suffered of their most basic rights.
After a recommendation from the Human Rights Committee to Japan to put an end to this practice, and the ruling by the High Court of Tokyo granting commensurate damages to the victim of a 12-year confinement finding his “deprogramming” illegal, the phenomenon seemed to gradually disappear.
However, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was murdered on 8 July 2022, by the son of a Unification Church member who made some donations some twenty years before, the church was accused of being responsible for his resentment and for Abe’s assassination.
Instead of targeting the criminal, an anti-cult lawyers’ association made the Unification Church responsible, calling it “anti-social” and “evil” in the media, which created a barrage of media coverage ostracizing its members, and brought about an unprecedented wave of violence and discrimination against the believers.
Over three decades of deprogramming of Church members done with carte blanche from the government—abduction and confinement by families and subjection to enforced persuasion by Protestant pastors, a nationwide activity conveniently termed “protection” by its advocates—resulted in an avalanche of tort cases initiated by former members, who have been persuaded by their deprogrammers or lawyers to file suits against the church.
The concept of “brainwashing evangelism” or “undue influence” has been used by the lawyers’ association—the National Network of Lawyers against Spiritual Sales, created to fight against the Unification Church—to file civil claims for rescission of donations and punitive damages against the church.
Adopting the reasoning of the Network lawyers based on consumer law, the courts ignored the faith of members who raised donations and assumed that they were only motivated by profit-making. They ignored the beliefs that they professed and considered those beliefs as just a cover for misleading newcomers.
Based on the premise of undue influence from the Unification Church, Japanese courts have assessed church practices against societal acceptability in religious matters, in order to rule these activities “anti-social” and tortious, i.e., the spreading of the faith and soliciting of donations to maintain church institutions.
After Abe’s assassination and under the pressure of the Network of anti-UC lawyers, the Government used 32 tort cases lost by the church for “violation of social norms” as a basis to initiate dissolution proceedings against the religious corporation, accusing it of having seriously harmed “public welfare” under Article 81 of the Religious Corporations Act.
The UN Human Rights Committee has issued repeated recommendations to Japan to stop using the concept of “public welfare” for restricting the right to manifest religious beliefs. Protection of public welfare is not a permitted limitation under Article 18.3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, nor is societal acceptability or conformity to social norms.
Nevertheless, and pending dissolution, the Japanese authorities have endeavored to hinder the church activities and, through the enactment of two tailor-made laws, prohibited “unjust solicitations” which suppress “the free will” of donors and organized the plundering of its assets by fostering claims for damages from deprogrammed members.
Under the theory of undue influence, happy believers are stripped of their legal capacity in religious matters and their families are entitled to rescind their donations in their place, and to sue for damages for the alleged family break-up.
After endorsing illegal deprogramming of the UC members for decades, the Japanese government has now adopted a new plan to organize the reeducation of their children through human rights classes and counseling delivered by apostates-trained counsellors.
It is also organizing the estrangement of second-generation believers from their families like in totalitarian states, by offering them “a temporary living space away from their parents or other believers, facilitating their path to rebuilding their lives.”
All the aforementioned provisions violate the right of the Unification Church members to freedom of religion or belief and their right to educate their children in conformity with their own convictions. They result in a dramatic situation for the UC believers and second-generation believers in Japan.
If nothing is done to stop this alarming trend of discriminatory, repressive measures from the Japanese authorities, this religious movement is doomed to disappear and its members to either relocate to another country or accept to recant their faith under coercion.
