Transplanting Foreign Norms: Human Rights and Other International Legal Norms in Japan

Abstract

This essay examines the challenges posed by attempts to transplant foreign legal norms, in the form of human rights standards, into a context that seems far from conducive to them. It reviews a major study showing that the Japanese courts consistently reject international human rights-based arguments, are systematically averse to reliance upon international norms which they use at best as a form of icing upon the cake, very rarely find violations of international norms, and consistently assume that those norms provide no greater protection than the bill of rights in the Constitution. It asks why, despite these factors, it is reasonable to arrive at a generally optimistic assessment of the positive role of international norms in the case of the Japanese legal system

Keywords: Japan, human rights, cultural relativism

JEL Classification: K33