Japan: Dissolution of the Unification Church. The Duval Report. 3. Reading the Decision
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The District Court relied not only on civil cases but also on settlements and statements, and ignored the issue of deprogramming.
April 23, 2025
In the decision of March 25, 2025, of the Tokyo District Court, ordering the dissolution of the Unification Church, the court first addresses the interpretation of “violation of laws and regulations” (Article 81.1 of the Religious Corporations Act).
The court states: “However, although it cannot be said that Article 709 of the Civil Code is a provision that prohibits certain acts, the acts that constitute the tort in this article are acts that are evaluated as illegal under the law of torts, that is, acts that violate certain legal norms, and the actor is held liable for damages under the provisions of this article.”
Article 709 of the Civil Code provides: “A person who has intentionally or negligently infringed any right of others, or legally protected interest of others, shall be liable to compensate any damages resulting in consequence.”
So, the court equated violation of the law with infringement of the rights of others, which is a private matter. As explained above, this new far-fetched interpretation, which was first adopted by the Supreme Court three weeks before, has been tailor-made for the Unification Church and its dissolution.
The court found that the acts of the Church members “restricted individuals’ freedom of decision-making, forcing them to make donations and purchases of goods while their ability to make normal judgments was impaired,” based on the unscientific and debunked theory of mental manipulation.
It added that these “acts are illegal as they deviate from what is considered socially appropriate, and they constitute ‘violations of laws and regulations’ as unlawful acts under the Civil Code.”
So the court, based on an alleged infringement of people’s free will, found a deviation from “social appropriateness” which would constitute a violation of laws and regulations.
However, this interpretation violates the commitments of Japan to protect freedom of religion or belief under Article 18.3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“ICCPR” or “Covenant”) it has ratified in 1979: “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.”
The requirement of “prescribed by law” is not fulfilled if the law is not precise enough to predict its application and to adapt one’s behavior accordingly. (United Nations Human Rights Committee, “CCPR General Comment no. 27: Article 12 [Freedom of Movement],” November 2, 1999: “The laws authorizing the application of restrictions should use precise criteria and may not confer unfettered discretion on those charged with their execution”).
Deviation from “social appropriateness” for sure does not meet the requirement of precision of the law that would allow for such a restriction to manifest one’s religion as the dissolution of a religious corporation; nor does the alleged infringement of unknown and undefined “social norms.” It makes this measure inconsistent with the commitments that Japan has made to the international community.
Then, the court had to assess whether the second requirement of Article 81.1 was fulfilled, i.e., whether the harm to public welfare could be characterized as “substantial.”
The court found that “the illegal acts in (a) above, committed by the followers of the interested parties, were repeated on a nationwide scale for a period of about 43 years, from around 1980 to around 2023, and caused at least 1,559 victims (140 victims with final judgments, 448 victims with court settlements, and 971 victims with out-of-court settlements).”
These figures will be discussed below.
The court concluded that, “These illegal acts have caused many people to suffer significant losses, and the peace of many people, including their relatives, has been disturbed.” It found the harm to public welfare to be “substantial” and ordered the dissolution of the religious corporation.
The use of protection of public welfare to restrict freedom of religion is also questionable, and so is the protection of the peaceful life of the majority. It violates Article 18.3 ICCPR mentioned above. The only permitted limitations to the right to manifest one’s beliefs concern extreme situations involving for example threats to public order or safety, but infringements of public welfare or peace of the majority are not amongst the situations that would justify restriction of this fundamental right. Actually, protection of freedom of religion or belief means protection of religious minorities “that may be the subject of hostility on the part of a predominant” community (United Nations Human Rights Committee, “CCPR General Comment No. 22: Article 18 [Freedom of Thought, Conscience or Religion)],” July 30, 1993).
The United Nations Human Rights Committee has constantly urged Japan to stop using “public welfare” as an exception to civil liberties, and in particular to that of practicing one’s religion or belief. But the Japanese government has persistently turned a deaf ear and left this exception in the Constitution and various laws, in particular the Civil Code (Article 1.1: “Private rights must conform to the public welfare”) and the law on religious corporations (Article 81.1 on dissolution, previously cited).
The Tokyo District Court relied expressly on these two legal provisions for its decision to order the dissolution of a major religious corporation of around 600,000 followers, making this decision illegal under international human rights law.
The figures given by the court and mentioned above (1,559 victims: 140 victims with final judgments, 448 victims with court settlements, and 971 victims with out-of-court settlements) rely first on thirty-two civil tort cases lost by the Church with decisions that MEXT filed in its dissolution claim.
However, the court started its argument by mentioning four criminal cases in 2007 and 2008 against followers who used to run private businesses of sale of good fortune items. This long-past practice had nothing to do with the Church, and the court as a matter of fact did not rely on them to rule the dissolution of the religious corporation. It looks as if the four criminal convictions for violation of the law on door-to-door sales, a practice of street selling that the Church instructed its members to stop long ago, were mentioned by the court to give a tint to the whole decision and damage the image of the Church from the outset. Following the attack line of the Network of lawyers against “spiritual sales” and MEXT, the court equated the sale of good fortune objects by private businesses with the solicitation of religious donations by the Church.
It relied on thirty-two civil tort cases lost by the Church over the years and swallowed, like the ruling courts had done, the Network lawyers’ theory that the Church religious doctrine was a means of infringement of the donors’ “free will” and they were under undue influence by the Church and should be refunded and compensated. In those rulings, the civil courts found tort and sentenced the Church to reimbursement of donations and to pay damages on the sole basis of an alleged infringement of the vague criteria of “social norms” or “socially acceptable norms.” Those rulings do not conform to the requirements of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as detailed above and constitute in themselves a violation of the right to freedom of religion or belief and the right to a fair trial.
Interesting enough is that the court did not even mention the fact that a majority of the claimants had been forcefully de-converted and driven to sue the Church. It could not ignore this fact though, since the defense lawyer developed it in his pleadings and since a deprogrammer in one of the cases, Pastor Mamoru Takazawa, was cross-examined during the hearings at the Kobe District Court in 1996 and stated that he knew that this practice was normally illegal.
He added that he would nevertheless continue since “Once someone has firmly embraced the Unification Church beliefs, I believe it is impossible for them to leave naturally.” This, in the deprogrammer’s mind, justified the use of coercion against the Church believers. The court ignored this aspect of the story and, to the defense attorney’s plea that the tort claims obtained from members under coercion were unreliable, the court kept silent. It did not bother to answer or even mention it in its decision. The argument was a valid and factual one though, that could have challenged the figures provided to the court and given a new insight on the alleged damage caused by the Church and its continuation to this day.
The defense provided a diagram of the number of claims which followed closely the number of deprogramming incidents.
In the above graph, the blue line represents the number of court cases, while the red line shows the number of abduction and confinement incidents. The number of court cases increases in proportion to the rise in confinement incidents, and decreases as the number of such incidents declines.
The number of incidents of deprogramming became null after the UN Human Rights Committee urged Japan to put an end to this practice in August 2014, and the Japanese courts for the first time granted substantial damages to a Church member for a 12-year deprogramming and ruled this practice illegal. The court ignored this factual argument and preferred to stress that there had been a huge number of claims since the 1980s, when this peak was actually created by a peak in the faith-breaking activities.
In order to stuff up its application for dissolution, which appeared weak since the number of thirty-two lost cases over a period of forty years, most of them dating from several decades back, is not significant, MEXT provided settlements in and out of court to the Tokyo District Court, which included them in its findings.
Regarding settlements in court, they concern former believers who filed a civil lawsuit seeking damages for the acts of soliciting donations and a settlement was reached in one hundred cases, including six cases out of the thirty-two above. In Japan, the judiciary encourages the resolution of disputes through settlement to bring cases to an early conclusion. In fact, nearly all of the cases in which the Church reached judicial settlements were the result of recommendations made by courts. As for settlements out of court, the number of claimants provided by MEXT relates to former believers who sent a notice to the Church, stating that the acts of soliciting donations constituted a tort, and an agreement was reached outside of court, including the payment of money.
To include settlements and voluntary refund of donations in the number of tort claims and to equate them with evidence of tortious misconduct, like the court did, is in itself questionable, since a claim for donation refund does not mean a ruling of tort, and no civil court has ever ruled on tort in these cases.
I refer here for more developments on this point to the in-depth review of the decision by Massimo Introvigne, a renowned sociologist of religions and attorney and former OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Representative for combating racism, xenophobia, and religious discrimination.
The policy of settlement and refund followed by the Church at some point was motivated by the desire to avoid systematic, lengthy, and costly proceedings initiated by the Network of lawyers as part of its strategy to sink the Church. Even the refund of donations has been interpreted as evidence of guilt. The District Court included the figures of refund of donations in its demonstration of tort and also included figures of written statements obtained by the MEXT under questionable conditions.
In spite of this artificial boosting of figures, the whole demonstration finally fell flat. The mountain gave birth to a mouse, since the court concluded that the overall number of claims had significantly decreased to none in the previous years, which is clearly evidenced in the diagram above (number of claims compared to number of deprogramming incidents).
The drop was also due to the extreme scrutiny by the Church of the solicitation of donations by its members and the adoption of internal measures to protect the Church. In particular, the Church adopted the 2009 Declaration of Compliance with existing laws and regulations, which is the subject of a lengthy review by the court in its decision.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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