FORWARDED MESSAGE FROM OCCUR

November 6, 2000

Dear all,

About the TMG's human rights guideline problem (the articles are on Oct 2 of ILGA mailing list, on Oct 4 of IGLHRC Action Alert and on Oct 2. of AP-Rainbow mailing list), TMG finally released its human rights guideline including L/G rights on November 21st. TMG finally recognized the existence of L/G human rights problem in Tokyo Prefecture publicly, and it will make concrete programs to make L/G rights situation better there with L/G NGO/CBOs in Tokyo.

We express our deep appreciation to all who wrote protest letters to TMG's governor Shintaro Ishihara, and all who are interested in this problem. The main reason why TMG re-included L/G rights is because a lot of protest letters against its decision of excluding L/G rights were sent to the government. When TMG collected public comments about the guideline after their release of the final bill, TMG got 746 letters from people interested in it, and about 520 of them (about 70% of them) were the letters urging TMG to re-include L/G rights. So TMG was not able to ignore the major opinion.

We are sorry that expressing our appreciation and releasing our opinion about the guideline were delayed so much from the first report of the TMG guideline (for AP-Rainbow, it was on Nov. 23 by Gaya-Nusantara; thank you very much for uproading the news of PlanetOut). We had to take long time to analyze TMG's guideline and verify our strategies to Japanese administrative system after TMG's release of its guideline.

Sincerely Yours,

Masaki Inaba Program Director of Advocacy Japan Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement (OCCUR)

p.s. The following article is about the details of the TMG human rights problem, so if you are interested in this issue, please read it.

1. Why L/G rights were excluded and re-included in the guideline again

Last December, TMG's specialist committee for drafting TMG's human rights guideline submitted its report which concluded "L/G rights should be included to the TMG's human rights programs" to the governor. But they excluded it 6 months later. Now it is clear that the main reason of the exclusion was because some of high officials of TMG (including vice-governors) expressed homophobic attitude very strongly against L/G rights. There were such kind of opinions from high officials like those; "If we write homosexual rights in the guideline, people will think that TMG is promoting homosexuals", "homosexual problem is not the problem of the existence and dignities of human beings".

In Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly which was held in July, three major parties asked TMG why L/G rights were excluded. TMG explained that it was because Tokyo's citizens didn't understand enough about L/Gs. Three parties didn't accept the explanation and required re-including L/G rights. And in September and October, some negotiations between NPO/NGOs and TMG were held and 30 NPO/NGOs urged TMG to write L/G rights clear again. But TMG didn't change its attitude until the release of the guideline in November.

But inside the TMG's large office building, Human Rights Division of TMG (HRD) and high officials had very hard discussions many times about L/G rights problem. HRD tried to persuade high officials to include L/G rights again, because they had the result of public comments from citizens. 70% of the public comments claimed TMG to write L/G rights clearly. If TMG continued excluding it, they had to make another reasons except citizens lack of understanding, but they didn't have any appropriate reasons to explain it. High officials and Education Bureau still objected against including, but finally they accepted HRD's proposal to write L/G rights in ambiguous way in the guideline in early November.

2. What We can do to use the guideline

L/G rights were re-included, but the way of writing is very ambiguous. It only says "Recently, various kind of problems around homosexuals have been arised". It mentions neither prohibition of discrimination nor public recognition of same-sex partnerships.

We have to say that it is the reflection of the complicated political situations around L/G rights inside TMG. It has many divisions which are negative about including L/G rights in their program, and some high officials are still very homophobic.

But we can say clearly that TMG declared publicly there were L/G human rights problem in Tokyo and they had to make official programs to solve it. We think that it is very important as the first step; they recognized the problem and now they have to cope with L/G communities and NPO/NGOs. In the another sections of the guideline, TMG proposes many kind of programs about human rights education, promotion and protection. We will propose conclete programs to make L/G's human rights situation better to TMG soon.

3. The situation of national government and other regional governments

Now we have two regional governments that have the human rights guidelines which mention L/G rights. They are Tokyo and Ehime (in the south west district of Japan). And Osaka Prefecture (which includes Japanese second largest city) and Kawasaki City (southern neighbor of Tokyo which has one million population) will release their human rights guideline which mention sexual minorities rights including LGBT.

About national government, specialists committee of human rights promotion submitted its report which proposed to organize independent Human Rights Committee(HRC). In the report, the specialist committee said that they have to investigate more about whether or not HRC include human rights violations based on sexual orientation, GID/GD and intersex. After TMG' guideline problem, we will make our effort to urge Japanese national government and the specialist committee to include LGBT issues as one of the problems which are treated by HRC.

INABA, Masaki
Program Director of Advocacy
Japan Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement (OCCUR)
E-mail: pinktri@kt.rim.or.jp