Violation of Judicial Independence and Due Process in the Unification Church Case in Japan. 2. Violating the Duty of Impartiality

The Tokyo District Court first decided the Church should be dissolved, then misinterpreted the law to support that decision.

By Patricia Duval

July 10, 2025

Article 2 of 4. Read article 1.

Note: We publish a report sent to the relevant Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations on June 30, 2025. The document partially reproduces the content of Patricia Duval’s series on deprogramming previously published in “Bitter Winter.”

The building hosting the Tokyo District Court. Credits.

Due process implies the conduct of legal proceedings according to established rules and principles for protecting and enforcing private rights, including the right to a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal. Judges must not only be impartial but also be seen to be unbiased. The tribunal must appear to a reasonable observer to be impartial (U.N. Human Rights Committee, Comment n° 32).

In the present instance, the rules and principles of the courts’ duty of impartiality have been violated, as detailed below.

Under Article 81.1 of the Religious Corporations Act, the government can apply to the court for a dissolution order against a religious corporation if “in violation of laws and regulations, it commits an act which is deemed to substantially harm public welfare.”

The Tokyo District Court had to rule on whether, in the absence of criminal acts, civil decisions in private litigation could be considered a “violation of laws and regulations” to pronounce the dissolution of the Family Federation’s religious corporation.

Japanese case law had, in the past, consistently answered this question in the negative. And succeeding Japanese governments maintained this interpretation. Before this case, there had been only two instances where the dissolution of a religious corporation was requested in court: the case of Aum Shinrikyo, whose members perpetrated the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and the case of Myokakuji Temple, whose members had been found guilty on criminal charges of fraud. In both cases, dissolution was ordered based on violations of statutory law, i.e., the Japanese Penal Code.

In the case of the dissolution order against Aum Shinrikyo, the Tokyo High Court ruled on the meaning of “violation of laws and regulations” in a request for a dissolution order filed by the prosecutor and the Tokyo Governor (Appellate decision dated December 19, 1995). The court held that “violation of laws and regulations” referred to acts contravening the prohibitive or prescriptive norms established by statutory laws such as the Penal Code. The Supreme Court upheld this interpretation in a decision of January 30, 1996 (Supreme Court Case No. 1996Ku8).

Police arrives at the site of Aum Shinrikyo’s terrorist sarin gas attack against the Tokyo subway, 1995. Credits.

In the Myokakuji Temple case, the Wakayama District Court ruled on the interpretation of the requirements for dissolution on January 24, 2002, which was upheld in the upper courts. It ruled that “acts” “in violation of laws and regulations” should be understood as referring to acts which “constitute violation of prohibitive or prescriptive norm as prescribed by substantive laws such as the Penal Code.”

Despite this consistent understanding of “violation of laws,” in the case of the Unification Church the dissolution was requested by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (“MEXT”), which oversees religious corporations, not by the public prosecutor, based on old private civil litigation involving deprogrammed members.

In its plea for dissolution, the Ministry (MEXT) relied on thirty-two tort rulings (over forty years), from which it concluded that Church members violated the law and “harmed public welfare substantially.” It also included in- and out-of-court settlements of financial claims to reinforce its argument.

The interpretation of the legal article providing for the dissolution of religious corporations was changed overnight by the government after the assassination of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022, bowing to the pressure of incessant media campaigns and accusations made by the Lawyers’ Network that the Church was a criminal organization.

The assassin’s mother had made donations to the Church some twenty years previously, and he justified his crime based on his resentment towards Abe due to his sympathetic attitude towards the Church.

Driven by political motives, the then-Prime Minister Kishida gave in to media pressure, proclaimed that past civil disputes could now be considered violations of laws, and filed a request for the dissolution of the Church.

The District Court, based on a laborious and highly questionable rationale, validated this re-interpretation of the law specifically designed to achieve the dissolution of the Unification Church.

The dissolution of the religious corporation was decided based on civil suits filed by private parties in which the courts found that the Church’s proselytism or solicitation of donations, based on alleged “brainwashing,” constituted a deviation from “social appropriateness.”

Thus, the Tokyo District Court found deviation from “social appropriateness” to constitute the violation of laws and regulations on which it based its dissolution order. The court ruled 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.”

The notion of social appropriateness is so vague that judges can arbitrarily determine when and to what religious group it applies. The wording of Article 81.1 of the Religious Corporations Act itself is ambiguous and contrary to international human rights standards.

Allowing dissolution when “in violation of laws and regulations, [the religious corporation] commits an act which is clearly found to harm public welfare substantially” violates the recommendations repeatedly made by the UN Human Rights Committee since Japan ratified the Covenant.

The UN Human Rights Committee in session. From X.

In recurrent Concluding Observations in 2008, 2014 and 2022, the Committee recommended the following to the Japanese government (December 2008, CCPR/C/JPN/CO/5 §10, 20 August 2014, CCPR/C/JPN/CO/6, and 30 November 2022, CCPR/C/JPN/CO/7 § 37): “Restriction of fundamental freedoms on the grounds of public welfare.’ The Committee reiterates its concern that the concept of ‘public welfare’ is vague and open-ended and may permit restrictions exceeding those permissible under the Covenant (arts. 2, 18, and 19). The Committee recalls its previous concluding observations (see CCPR/C/JPN/CO/5, para. 10) and urges the State party to refrain from imposing any restriction on the rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion or freedom of expression unless they fulfil the strict conditions set out in paragraph 3 of articles 18 and 19.”

Japan never complied with those repeated recommendations. The Japanese Constitution still enshrines articles allowing restrictions to human rights when they are based on the protection of “public welfare” (Articles 12 and 13). The legal provision relied upon by the District Court to order the dissolution refers expressly to this vague and arbitrary concept.

Dissolving a religious corporation based on such a vague and ambiguous concept would not only violate Article 18(3) of the Covenant as the protection of “public welfare” is not amongst the permitted limitations to freedom of religion or belief (which entails the protection of religious minorities against dominant hostile majority), and the recommendations issued by the Human Rights Committee, but can also be seen as enabling arbitrary judgments—thereby undermining the fairness and impartiality of the judiciary.

The Tokyo District Court appears to have predetermined the conclusion of its decision, that the Family Federation had to be dissolved, and then applied arbitrary interpretations of the law to justify that outcome. This constitutes a flagrant violation of the principle of judicial independence and impartiality.

Source: bitterwinter.org