Japan is one of the 55 retentionist countries that still maintain the cruel and unjustifiable practice of the death penalty in their legislation. At the end of 2023 there were 115 people on death row in Japan. The situation of these inmates is extremely harsh: they are deprived of all contact with the outside world and can only receive visits from immediate family members once a month. They are held in solitary confinement, in 5-square-meter cells and forced to wait for their execution for an average of seven years, without any prior notice, a fact that the Japanese government justifies as a measure to protect their mental health.
Despite the official justification, the reality is completely different. Amnesty International, which has been working for decades to ban this inhumane practice, has shown that people sentenced to death in Japan suffer serious mental health problems due to the uncertainty of not knowing when they will be executed. This practice is harmful, not only for the condemned persons, but also for their families.
About the selection in this edition of IMPACTE! Festival de Cinema i Drets Humans de Catalunya of the documentary “Sóc la seva filla”, in which the Japanese director Yo Nagatsuka explains the personal suffering and social marginalization suffered by the daughter of a man executed in capital punishment, and the disregard by the Japanese government to respect the family pain, IMPACTE! has started a campaign to collect signatures to demand the elimination of the death penalty in Japan.
We have written a letter addressed to the Minister of Justice of this country, in which we “urge you to modify the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure of Japan to eliminate any reference to the death penalty, and to modify the Constitution to explicitly prohibit its use”. And we declare that “As an organization that defends human rights, we reaffirm our conviction that the death penalty is a cruel and unjustifiable practice, harmful to the fundamental right to life, which a State must respect above all else”.
The letter can be signed here and, in person, in the different sessions of the festival. Once this edition is over, we will send the signatures to the Japanese Ministry of Justice.
Since IMPACTE! is more than a Festival and wants to promote social awareness and activism in favor of Human Rights, we invite you to sign the petition.
