Japan authorities panel to resolve whether or not to ask court docket to revoke authorized standing of Unification Church

TOKYO — Japan’s authorities is convening a non secular affairs council on Thursday to ask specialists to resolve whether or not to hunt a court docket order to revoke the authorized standing of the Unification Church. The church’s fundraising techniques and comfortable ties with the governing get together have triggered public outrage.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s authorities has taken powerful stance in a perceived transfer to shore up help, harm by his governing Liberal Democratic get together’s decades-long ties with the South Korea-based church that surfaced within the investigation of former chief Shinzo Abe’s 2022 assassination.

The alleged Abe killer informed police that his motive was the previous prime minister’s hyperlink to the church that had bankrupted his household as a result of his mom’s extreme donations.

Schooling Minister Masahito Moriyama informed specialists on the panel in his opening remarks that his ministry, if endorsed by the panel, hopes to file for a court docket approval to strip the church’s authorized standing.

If the panel endorses the step, the ministry is predicted to file for a court docket approval as early as Friday, in response to Japanese media. If the authorized standing is stripped, the church would lose its tax exemption privilege as a non secular group however can nonetheless function.

If authorized, the church would be the first to lose its authorized standing beneath a civil code violation. Two earlier {cases} concerned legal fees — the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which was behind a sarin nerve fuel assault on the Tokyo subway, and the Myokakuji group, whose executives had been convicted of fraud.

Moriyama mentioned his ministry has reached its conclusions after interviewing 170 victims of the church’s alleged fundraising and different issues. The ministry held a number of hearings and mentioned the church failed to answer dozens of questions throughout them.

The Unification Church, based in South Korea in 1954 by Solar Myung Moon, obtained authorized standing as a non secular group in Japan in 1968 amid an anti-communist motion supported by Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.

Because the Seventies, the church has been accused of devious enterprise and recruitment techniques, together with brainwashing members into making large donations to Moon, usually ruining their funds and households. It has confronted lots of of civil lawsuits and acknowledged extreme donations however says the issue has been mitigated for greater than a decade. It just lately pledged additional reforms.

Specialists say Japanese followers are requested to pay for sins dedicated by their ancestors throughout Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, and that almost all of the church’s worldwide funding comes from Japan.