The Japan Federation of Bar Associations' recent call to abolish capital punishment should serve as a catalyst for informed and broad public discussions. Both the Justice Ministry and the lawyer group have an important role to play in making necessary information available to ensure those discussions are meaningful. The ministry's responsibility is especially heavy — the secrecy surrounding this nation's death penalty system is often blamed for the lack of public discourse on the issue.

The bar federation adopted a resolution calling for ending capital punishment at its Oct. 6 meeting in Fukui for promoting protection of human rights, with 546 of the 786 participants supporting it. Some lawyers who support capital punishment criticize that it is unreasonable for the organization not to accept letters of attorney from members who could not attend the meeting. Still, the declaration by the organization comprising some 37,600 Japanese lawyers and hundreds of registered foreign legal professionals is significant. The federation in the past always stopped short of calling for an outright end to death penalty, although at a similar meeting five years ago it called for starting broad discussions on abolishing capital punishment and requested that the justice minister suspend executions.

A key factor behind the move is an international trend. According to Amnesty International, 102 countries had abolished the death penalty as of the end of 2015, a sharp increase from 60 in 1996, and another 38 countries have not carried out executions for 10 years or longer. Of the 35 OECD member countries, only Japan, the United States and South Korea retain capital punishment as an institution, although South Korea's last execution was in 1997. In 2014, the United Nations Human Rights Committee urged Japan to "give due consideration in the abolition of the death penalty."