Campaigns & Global Issues

Japan's ruling coalition, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, cut off debate and pushed the Legislation for Peace and Security through the House of Representatives’ special committee on security legislation on July 15, 2015.

This paves the way for the legislation to be passed into law later this summer. Once passed, the Legislation for Peace and Security will greatly expand the overseas role of the Self-Defense Forces and allow for Japan to exercise its “right to collective self-defense” and participate in military operations with other countries such as the United States.

In order to avoid a lengthy constitutional revision process that could affect the outcome of the Upper House elections next year, Japan's ruling coalition has sought to “redefine” military deployment in terms that are somehow compatible with Japan's Peace Constitution.

At the beginning of July, in an interview with Shingetsu News Agency‘s Michael Penn on behalf of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, Japan Communist Party Leader Kazuo Shii remarked that Japanese legislators were “debating concepts here that are used nowhere else in the world:”

[Shii] suggested that the government was forced to employ tortured logic and to create entirely new legal concepts that no one had ever heard of […]

[…] The most amusing example that Shii posited was the Abe government’s concept of “the use of weapons.”

The prime minister argued in Diet debate that should the Self-Defense Forces come under attack while providing “rear area support” for a foreign military force, that it would be perfectly allowable that they have recourse to “the use of weapons” to defend themselves.

At the same time, however, Prime Minister Abe staunchly refuses to acknowledge that “the use of weapons” can be regarded as a practical synonym for “the use of force” – which is, of course, explicitly banned by Japan’s Constitution.

Public support for the ruling coalition, made up of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (Japan's “natural governing party”) and junior coalition partner Komeito, has plummeted because of new security legislation.

It has been noted there are similarities between Shinzo Abe's efforts to pass the new security legislation and his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, who worked to sign a revised security treaty between the United States and Japan in 1960.

Riots broke out in Tokyo in January 1960 when the new Kishi-backed Japan-US security treaty was signed. Six months later Kishi, also a former cabinet minister in Japan's wartime fascist government, would be forced to resign due to his unpopularity.

There is some anticipation that Shinzo Abe himself may be forced to resign himself before long to take responsibility for the unpopularity of the new Peace and Security legislation prior to the 2016 Upper House elections.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute puts Greece's annual military budget at $4bn. However past decades of much greater spending by corrupt administrations is the legacy of the CIA supported military junta of the 1960s and 70s, followed by readmission into NATO and then EC membership in 1981.

Greece’s debt stands at around $320 billion, 175% of GDP. The so-called Troika of the EU, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF are insisting that the Athens government must impose yet more cuts in public spending. But instead of further austerity for workers and pensioners, the solution is for Greece to embark on a massive disarmament programme.

Greece is the largest importer of conventional weapons in Europe and its military spending is the highest in the European Union relative to GDP. The Hellenic Armed Forces have a sunbstantial navy and a modern airforce of over 200 fighters, including US F16s and French Mirages. Greece has compulsory military service for men over 18.

The international campaigning and advocacy organization ONE is campaigning for the Bank for International Settlements to reveal its data on international tax havens. Releasing this data would help citizens and transparency campaigners follow the money, root out corruption and ensure that resources are used to fight extreme poverty rather than lost to dodgy deals.

While the corruption at HSBC's Swiss Bank was revealed by whistleblower Hervé Falciani, a former employee of the bank, the BIS (French: Banque des règlements internationaux, BRI), an international organization of central banks based in Basel, has produced data on the staggering amount of money held in tax havens. The Africa Progress Panel found that the Democratic Republic of Congo lost over $1.3bn – or almost twice its combined health and education budgets – between 2010 and 2012 as a result of just five dodgy mining deals struck by firms incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, and companies based in Bermuda, Jersey, Gibraltar and the UK.

You can join the campaign and call on the Bank for International Settlements, and its chairman Christian Noyer, to release the data.

MEPs in the INTA committee voted 19-12 in favour of David Martin MEP's opinion recommending ACTA be rejected.

There have now been 5 committees that have said that the European Parliament should reject ACTA (more information on the previous 4). But what we have behind us is not just 5 useful opinions from committees. We have 5 examples of democracy in action, giving us proof that expressing your opinions to your elected representatives can have a real and demonstrable effect. 5 reasons to keep on the same path as we turn our attention to the plenary vote on 4th July where all the MEPs will vote.

But the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will rewrite the global rules on IP enforcement. All signatory countries will be required to conform their domestic laws and policies to the provisions of the Agreement. The nine nations currently negotiating the TPP are the U.S., Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam. However, Canada and Mexico has also been invited to join the negotiations so it is very likely they will do so. The TPP will contain a chapter on Intellectual Property (copyright, trademarks, patents and perhaps geographical indications) that will have a broad impact on citizens’ rights, the future of the Internet’s global infrastructure, and innovation across the world.

A leaked version of the February 2011 draft U.S. TPP Intellectual Property Rights Chapter [PDF] indicates that U.S. negotiators are pushing for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by international treaties, including the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).