An amendment to the law against organized crimes, finally submitted to the Diet this week by the Abe administration, deviates from the principle of the nation's criminal law system to penalize people for the crimes they have committed. If enacted, the amendment will punish groups of two or more people for plotting and preparing for nearly 300 types of crimes without actually carrying them out. The government says the measure is essential for Japan to beef up its efforts to thwart terrorism. Opponents point out that existing exceptions to the principle — legal provisions to penalize the act of plotting and preparing to commit roughly 70 types of serious offenses — should serve the purpose instead of introducing a new blanket legislative measure. The government says that won't be enough, without specifically and convincingly explaining why.

What seems likely is that investigative authorities will seek to widen their dragnet of surveillance over society to crack down on crimes in their planning stages, possibly intruding more into the sphere of people's privacy. Police tools for such investigations have been widened over the years, including the expanded use of wiretapping in criminal probes. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations warns that the proposed legislation will prompt calls for the introduction of more such tools, including the installation of bugging devices to eavesdrop on conversations involving targets of investigation. In proposing the legislation to the Diet for deliberations, the government needs to address such concerns.

The administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has instead been busy emphasizing that the legislation is different from the government's past aborted bills to make it a crime for people to conspire to commit a broad range of offenses. The "conspiracy crime" bills submitted three times in the mid-2000s were scrapped each time in the Diet as they incurred strong criticism that penalizing the acts of plotting for crimes could violate people's freedom of inner thoughts.