Newsletter No. 981
News-Analysis
April 17, 2008

 

NAGOYA HIGH COURT DECLARES ASDF IRAQ MISSION UNCONSTITUTIONAL

In a breaking news development that I wanted to report immediately, the Nagoya High Court has just declared the Air Self-Defense Forces (ASDF) mission in Iraq to be unconstitutional. This is the very first time that the Japanese courts have ruled against the government on an SDF deployment issue, and it comes on the heels of the hardline Supreme Court decision on the Tachikawa leaflets case (see Shingetsu Newsletter No. 977).

In this latest judgment, Presiding Judge Kunio Aoyama said the ASDF's airlifting activities to and from Iraq “run counter to the war-renouncing Constitution.”

Photo: Plaintiffs celebrate the court’s ruling
Source: Asahi Shinbun

The suit had been filed against the government by a citizen’s group that includes former Japanese Ambassador to Lebanon Naoto Amaki as one of the plaintiffs. Recall that the Shingetsu Institute interviewed Ambassador Amaki in Shingetsu Newsletter No. 703 in August of last year.

The Nagoya District Court had rejected the same case in April 2006 with the argument that the plaintiffs had no right to bring such a suit as they had suffered no personal harm from the government’s decision. The lower court had refused to offer a judgment on whether or not the SDF deployments to Iraq were in accordance with the Constitution.

What Happens Now?

Now that a Japanese court has officially ruled that the ASDF deployment is a violation of the nation’s highest law, what can we expect to happen? Will the ASDF now be withdrawn?

I’ll venture my immediate prediction, and we will all see how well it holds up in the coming weeks and months:

The ASDF will remain in place. In the coming days conservative commentators will launch a full barreled attack on the Nagoya High Court. They will simultaneously try to downplay the judgment’s significance and suggest that the court is in the grips of irresponsible leftist sympathizers. The Fukuda Administration will announce that they strongly disagree with the court’s judgment and will refuse to change their deployment policies. More quietly, however, they might shelve the idea of a new GSDF deployment to Sudan.

The government will appeal the judgment to the Supreme Court. The process will take many months. Considering the boot-licking judgment that the highest court just handed down on the Tachikawa leaflets case, we can expect that the Supreme Court will eventually overturn the judgment and rule completely on the side of the government sometime in 2009 or so.

Let’s see how accurate this prediction turns out to be.