Leprosy Compensation (November 20,2005)
Leprosy compensation
“Last month, the Tokyo District Court handed down contradictory rulings in two separate compensation suits filed by former Taiwanese and South Korean leprosy patients who were locked up in special isolation facilities during Japanese colonial rule. One judge ruled that the Taiwanese plaintiffs were entitled to compensation, but the other judge rejected the case for South Koreans.
In both cases, the plaintiffs were seeking redress under Japan’s Hansen’s disease compensation law. Although the state and the plaintiffs appealed the rulings, respectively, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry has begun to consider comprehensive relief for Taiwanese and South Korean victims of Japan’s previous leprosy policy under a new framework. We welcome the decision to find a way to provide relief for these overseas victims. The question now is what would be an appropriate settlement.”
Both court cases involve fundamental human rights. The former patients in South Korea and Taiwan should be treated the same as former Japanese patients and paid the same level of compensation. The central government should act swiftly to help these now elderly people.
The Hansen’s disease compensation law was enacted in 2001 following the finalization of a Kumamoto District Court ruling that declared the government’s isolation policy unconstitutional. The preamble to the law says the government takes the grim facts seriously with “repentance” and “remorse.”
During Diet deliberations on the bill it was agreed that compensation should be paid not only to leprosy sufferers incarcerated in state-operated sanatoriums after the end of World War II but also to patients isolated at private facilities and those who were kept behind closed doors during the pre-war period.
In response to a proposal that patients confined to sanatoriums in the Korean Peninsula should be treated equally, the vice health minister at the time said the issue would be discussed at a committee to be set up to assess what happened at such facilities.
A special fact-finding panel was created to study this issue. The panel’s report recognized that sanatoriums in the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan were “treated equally” with similar state-run facilities in Japan. As evidence, the report pointed out that the Japanese heads of the sanatoriums in the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan attended a health ministry meeting of chiefs of state-operated sanatoriums in Japan that was held in July 1941.
The panel’s findings argue strongly for equal compensation for both domestic and overseas victims. The former patients from South Korea and Taiwan are seeking 8 million yen each. This is the lowest of the four amounts set by the compensation law on the basis of the length of incarceration. They are trying to hold the Japanese government accountable for policies that were in place until the end of Japan’s colonial rule in 1945. The government should not attempt to strike a bargain on what sum is appropriate.
The leprosy suits filed against the Japanese government provoked considerable soul-searching in South Korea and Taiwan over the violations of human rights of former patients. If Japan admits its past mistakes candidly and compensates all victims on an equal footing, that would in great measure improve Japan’s image overseas.
Besides the matter of compensation, there is another important issue that needs to be addressed in working out a new relief program for overseas victims. It is the eligibility of the people isolated at facilities in the Pacific islands that were once ruled by Japan.
If the circumstances are the same, these people should also be eligible for compensation. The government should not wait until research into the situation at these places is over. It should quickly start paying compensation to the victims in South Korea and Taiwan, whose stories are already known. The average age of the former patients is already over 80. There is little time left.
The fastest way to rescue the overseas sufferers would be to revise the health ministry’s official notice about the law. If that is difficult, the government can consider amending the compensation law or even enacting new legislation. What is most important is to compensate the neglected overseas victims quickly and equally with their domestic counterparts. The health ministry should not forget this principle when it works on the new relief program.
