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The Carlos Ghosn case shines a light into the dark corners of Japanese justice

Jeff Kingston

The former Nissan boss is right to point the finger at a legal system that the UN has described as ‘medieval


Wed 8 Jan 2020 13.01 EST

Last modified on Wed 8 Jan 2020 13.03 EST

 Former Renault-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn. Photograph: Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images

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n a long and detailed press conference on Wednesday, Carlos Ghosn – former head of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, who made a dramatic escape from his house arrest in Japan last month – came out with guns blazing.

Speaking in Beirut, he alleged that former Nissan colleagues and prosecutors were co-conspirators in a plot to oust him in order to prevent a closer merger with Renault. Ghosn denied the allegations against him, which include under-reporting his income and misusing company funds, and said that he was mistreated while in solitary confinement. This included interrogations that lasted for up to eight hours a day without a lawyer present. The presumption of guilt, and the pressure placed on him by Japanese prosecutors to confess, convinced him that there was no chance of a fair trial. And so he fled.

Given his brash demeanour and immense wealth, Ghosn is not a sympathetic character. Indeed, he may well be guilty of financial misconduct. But he is right to shine a light into the dark corners of Japan’s justice system. Anyone familiar with the Japanese justice system would know that Ghosn’s allegations are not far-fetched.

In Japan, laws are used as weapons against targeted people and not applied equally. One example of this is the “hostage justice” (hitojichi-shiho) system. Hostage justice boils down to the accused remaining in custody until they incriminate themselves by signing a confession. Often this is drawn up by prosecutors who browbeat the accused without defence counsel. Knowing that the playing field is tilted in favour of the prosecutors and that they could spend a very long time in jail even before going to court, many innocent defendants confess. Ghosn spent more than 120 days in detention.

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 Japan’s justice minister, Masako Mori, speaks to the media about Ghosn’s escape. The Japanese legal system has been accused of abandoning the presumption of innocence for defendants. Photograph: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

In the late 1980s, a once high-flying company president called Hiromasa Ezoe was accused of bribery. Despite extreme pressure to confess, Ezoe defied prosecuting authorities by pleading not guilty. Over a decade of judicial purgatory later, he was effectively exonerated by receiving a suspended three-year sentence in 2003. In 2010 he published a book, Where is the Justice?, a savage indictment of a system in which the presumption of innocence is abandoned and defendants are railroaded. Ghosn may well have wanted to avoid this fate.

In Japan, the accused can be held for 23 days without charge – this is almost indefinitely renewable as judges normally give prosecutors the benefit of the doubt. In April 2019, more than 1,000 lawyers and scholars submitted a petition to the justice ministry demanding an end to this antediluvian system. The Japan Federation of Bar Associations has also long lobbied against it.

The 2019 petition doesn’t mince its words, asserting that the “long-term detention in the Carlos Ghosn case has triggered surprise and criticism overseas, leading to doubts about Japan’s integrity as a democratic nation that guarantees human rights”.

Japan’s hostage justice, interrogation procedures barring lawyers and arbitrary denial of family contact are out of step with many other democracies and international law. The UN Human Rights committee has called on Japan to reform its criminal justice system to allow for the presence of defence counsel, while a UN committee against torture called Japan’s criminal justice system “medieval”.

In recent years, the media has exposed many cases of prosecutors’ abuse of power, inventing, misinterpreting or ignoring exonerating evidence in an attempt to maintain the dubious distinction of a 99% conviction rate. Recognising the problem, the justice ministry has since the 2000s introduced piecemeal reforms to reduce dependence on confessions and allowing some videotaping of interrogations. Even so, the system remains stacked against defendants.

While Ghosn managed a dramatic escape, ordinary Japanese citizens remain vulnerable to a judicial system that draws sharp criticism from domestic civil society organisations, lawyers’ federations and the media. The vested interests are scrambling to defend this system, but it’s high time to end the era of Japanese prosecutors running amok and trampling on civil liberties.

• Jeff Kingston is director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/carlos-ghosn-nissan-boss-japanese-justice

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Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet

George Monbiot

Scientists are replacing crops and livestock with food made from microbes and water. It may save humanity’s bacon


Wed 8 Jan 2020 01.00 EST

Last modified on Wed 8 Jan 2020 08.20 EST

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t sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

The hydrogen pathway used by Solar Foods is about 10 times as efficient as photosynthesis. But because only part of a plant can be eaten, while the bacterial flour is mangetout, you can multiply that efficiency several times. And because it will be brewed in giant vats the land efficiency, the company estimates, is roughly 20,000 times greater. Everyone on Earth could be handsomely fed, and using a tiny fraction of its surface. If, as the company intends, the water used in the process (which is much less than required by farming) is electrolysed with solar power, the best places to build these plants will be deserts.

We are on the cusp of the biggest economic transformation, of any kind, for 200 years. While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life. After 12,000 years of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming: brewing microbes through precision fermentation. This means multiplying particular micro-organisms, to produce particular products, in factories.I know some people will be horrified by this prospect. I can see some drawbacks. But I believe it comes in the nick of time.

Several impending disasters are converging on our food supply, any of which could be catastrophic. Climate breakdown threatens to cause what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures”, through synchronous heatwaves and other impacts. The UN forecasts that by 2050 feeding the world will require a 20% expansion in agriculture’s global water use. But water use is already maxed out in many places: aquifers are vanishing, rivers are failing to reach the sea. The glaciers that supply half the population of Asia are rapidly retreating. Inevitable global heating – due to greenhouse gases already released – is likely to reduce dry season rainfall in critical areas, turning fertile plains into dustbowls.

A global soil crisis threatens the very basis of our subsistence, as great tracts of arable land lose their fertility through erosion, compaction and contamination. Phosphate supplies, crucial for agriculture, are dwindling fast. Insectageddon threatens catastrophic pollination failures. It is hard to see how farming can feed us all even until 2050, let alone to the end of the century and beyond.

Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution. Across vast tracts of the world’s surface, it has replaced complex wild ecosystems with simplified human food chains. Industrial fishing is driving cascading ecological collapse in seas around the world. Eating is now a moral minefield, as almost everything we put in our mouths – from beef to avocados, cheese to chocolate, almonds to tortilla chips, salmon to peanut butter – has an insupportable environmental cost.

But just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farmfree food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale. It means an end to the exploitation of animals, an end to most deforestation, a massive reduction in the use of pesticides and fertiliser, the end of trawlers and longliners. It’s our best hope of stopping what some have called the “sixth great extinction”, but I prefer to call the great extermination. And, if it’s done right, it means cheap and abundant food for everyone.

Research by the thinktank RethinkX suggests that proteins from precision fermentation will be around 10 times cheaper than animal protein by 2035. The result, it says, will be the near-complete collapse of the livestock industry. The new food economy will “replace an extravagantly inefficient system that requires enormous quantities of inputs and produces huge amounts of waste with one that is precise, targeted, and tractable”. Using tiny areas of land, with a massively reduced requirement for water and nutrients, it “presents the greatest opportunity for environmental restoration in human history”.

Not only will food be cheaper, it will also be healthier. Because farmfree foods will be built up from simple ingredients, rather than broken down from complex ones, allergens, hard fats and other unhealthy components can be screened out. Meat will still be meat, though it will be grown in factories on collagen scaffolds, rather than in the bodies of animals. Starch will still be starch, fats will still be fats. But food is likely to be better, cheaper and much less damaging to the living planet.

It might seem odd for someone who has spent his life calling for political change to enthuse about a technological shift. But nowhere on Earth can I see sensible farm policies developing. Governments provide an astonishing £560bn a year in farm subsidies, and almost all of them are perverse and destructive, driving deforestation, pollution and the killing of wildlife. Research by the Food and Land Use Coalition found that only 1% of the money is used to protect the living world. It failed to find “any examples of governments using their fiscal instruments to directly support the expansion of supply of healthier and more nutritious food.”

Nor is the mainstream debate about farming taking us anywhere, except towards further catastrophe. There’s a widespread belief that the problem is intensive farming, and the answer is extensification (producing less food per hectare). It’s true that intensive farming is highly damaging, but extensive farming is even worse. Many people are rightly concerned about urban sprawl. But agricultural sprawl – which covers a much wider area – is a far greater threat to the natural world. Every hectare of land used by farming is a hectare not used for wildlife and complex living systems.

A paper in Nature suggests that, per kilo of food produced, extensive farming causes greater greenhouse gas emissions, soil loss, water use and nitrogen and phosphate pollution than intensive farming. If everyone ate pasture-fed meat, we would need several new planets on which to produce it.

Farmfree production promises a far more stable and reliable food supply that can be grown anywhere, even in countries without farmland. It could be crucial to ending world hunger. But there is a hitch: a clash between consumer and producer interests. Many millions of people, working in farming and food processing, will eventually lose their jobs. Because the new processes are so efficient, the employment they create won’t match the employment they destroy.

RethinkX envisages an extremely rapid “death spiral” in the livestock industry. Only a few components, such as the milk proteins casein and whey, need to be produced through fermentation for profit margins across an entire sector to collapse. Dairy farming in the United States, it claims, will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. It believes that the American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.

While I doubt the collapse will be quite that fast, in one respect the thinktank underestimates the scale of the transformation. It fails to mention the extraordinary shift taking place in feedstock production to produce alternatives to plant products, of the kind pioneered in Helsinki. This is likely to hit arable farming as hard as cultured milk and meat production will hit livestock farming. Solar Foods thinks its products could reach cost parity with the world’s cheapest form of protein (soya from South America) within five years. Instead of pumping ever more subsidies into a dying industry, governments should be investing in helping farmers into other forms of employment, while providing relief funds for those who will suddenly lose their livelihoods.

Another hazard is the potential concentration of the farmfree food industry. We should strongly oppose the patenting of key technologies, to ensure the widest possible distribution of ownership. If governments regulate this properly, they could break the hegemony of the massive companies that now control global food commodities. If they don’t, they could reinforce it. In this sector, as in all others, we need strong anti-trust laws. We must also ensure that the new foods always have lower carbon footprints than the old ones: farmfree producers should power their operations entirely from low-carbon sources. This is a time of momentous choices, and we should make them together.

We can’t afford to wait passively for technology to save us. Over the next few years we could lose almost everything, as magnificent habitats such as the rainforests of Madagascar, West Papua and Brazil are felled to produce cattle, soya or palm oil. By temporarily shifting towards a plant-based diet with the lowest possible impacts (no avocados or out-of-season asparagus), we can help buy the necessary time to save magnificent species and places while these new technologies mature. But farmfree food offers hope where hope was missing. We will soon be able to feed the world without devouring it.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist. His film Apocalypse Cow is on Channel 4 at 10pm on Wednesday

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

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My comments :

1.  Although without a doubt, a hopeful development from an environmental perspective, I would nevertheless warn anybody to watch the employment of the strong arms tactics of the powerful worldwide agro-lobby, the moment these products will hit the world market in a serious way,

2.  The enormous global impact (already present in our societies) of the power of the weapon-, tobacco- and fossil fuel lobbies might be dwarfed when it will come to the full employment of the powerlobby of the worldwide agro-industry.

 3.  The destiny of our planet in  general and of our human habitat in particular is - for the moment at least - still as catastrophic as ever before, so do not have any illusion of avoiding the climate catastrophe that is emerging in full around us as we speak.

4. Do not neglect the fact either, that (a substantial part of) the very same people (like the Koch Brother conglomerate) who are advocating the abolition of democracy, do have a major stake in the fossil energy production.

5.  Contrary to what they want us to believe, they already have been well informed for a considerable amount of time (think for example of the shockingly revealing Shell studies of the eighties) about the long term effects on our global habitat by unleashing CO2 and other highly damaging substances by the unlimited burning of mineral fuel on a global scale.

6. Therefor they have concluded years ago already, that the only way, to avoid adaption to stronger laws - implemented by democratic lawmakers - will be to switch to a totalitarian regime in time, so their profit-model can be assured for the time to come. 

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Trump's lawless thuggery is corrupting justice in America

Robert ReichIntimidating whistleblowers, politicizing law enforcement, protecting rogue military officers and criminal sheriffs – the pattern is depressingly clear

 ‘Almost wherever you look, he has shown utter disdain for law.’ Photograph: Tom Brenner/Reuters

Sun 5 Jan 2020 01.00 EST

Last modified on Sun 5 Jan 2020 07.00 EST

As the Senate moves to an impeachment trial and America slouches into this election year, the rule of law is center stage.

Yet Donald Trump is substituting lawless thuggery for impartial justice.

The biggest immediate news is the president’s killing of Qassem Suleimani. The act brings America to the brink of an illegal war with Iran without any congressional approval, in direct violation of Congress’s war-making authority under the constitution.

But other presidents have disregarded Congress’s war-making power, too. What makes Trump unique is the overall pattern. Almost wherever you look, he has shown utter disdain for law. Consider Trump’s outing of the person who blew the whistle on his phone call to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – tweeting just after Christmas a link to a Washington Examiner article headlined with the presumed whistleblower’s name, then retweeting a supporter who named the presumed whistleblower.

Even before outing the whistleblower, Trump had whipped his followers into a lather by calling the whistleblower a “spy”, guilty of “treason”.

The outing not only imperils the whistleblower’s safety. It violates the purpose of the Whistleblower Act, which is to protect people who alert authorities that government officials are violating the law.

It’s on this deeper level that Trump’s lawlessness is most corrosive. From now on, anyone aware of illegality on the part of a government official, including a president, will think twice before sounding the alarm.

Trump’s intrusion into the navy’s prosecution of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher on war crimes has the same corrosive effect.

Trump not only stopped the navy from possibly giving Gallagher a less-than-honorable discharge. Trump also upended the military code of justice, designed for the military to handle legal violations in its ranks, including war crimes.

Gallagher’s Navy Seal accusers were themselves whistleblowers who broke the Seal’s code of silence in order to stop a rogue chief. Now they face recrimination from within the ranks. From now on, any soldier who witnesses a superior officer committing possible war crimes will be more reluctant to report them.

Similarly, Trump’s ongoing intrusions into the justice department (DoJ) and the FBI aren’t just efforts to derail investigations of his wrongdoing. They’re attacks on the system of impartial justice itself.

Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, is supposed to be responsible to the American people. Instead he’s become Trump’s advocate. Barr even advised the White House not to turn over the whistleblower complaint to Congress.

After misleading the public on the contents of Robert Mueller’s report, Barr bowed to Trump’s demand that the department look into the origin of the FBI investigation that had led to the Mueller report.

And now, after the DoJ’s own inspector general has found that the FBI had plenty of evidence to start its Russia inquiry – more than 100 contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian agents during the 2016 campaign – Barr refuses to be bound by the findings, and has appointed a prosecutor to launch yet another inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation.

The deeper systemic corrosion: from now on, attorneys general won’t be presumed to be administering impartial justice, and the findings of special counsels and inspectors general will have less finality and legitimacy.

Barr is part of Trump’s private goon squad, along with Rudy Giuliani, chief enabler Mick Mulvaney and Trump’s resident white supremacist, Stephen Miller.

Giuliani is using the authority of the presidency to mount a rogue foreign policy designed to keep Trump in power. It’s double lawlessness: Giuliani is bending the law and he’s accountable to no one.

Miller, meanwhile, is waging Trump’s ongoing war against people legally seeking asylum in the United States – featuring family separations, caged children and inhumane detention.

Miller even got Trump to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who was ordered by a federal judge to stop detaining people solely on suspicion of their immigration status. Arpaio disregarded the order, which is why he was convicted of criminal contempt of court.

From now on, rogue sheriffs will be less constrained.

You see the pattern: whistleblowers intimidated, the justice department politicized, findings of special counsels and inspectors general distorted or ignored, foreign policy made by a private citizen unaccountable to anybody, rogue military officers and rogue sheriffs pardoned.

Each instance is disturbing on its own. Viewed as a whole, Trump’s lawlessness is systematically corrupting justice in the US.

Impartial justice is the keystone of a democracy. Even if the Senate fails to remove Trump for impeachable offenses, American voters must do so next November.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/05/trump-american-justice-election-iran