Japan prisoner Nick Baker: reduced sentence, but still no justice

11.55.46am UTC (GMT +0000) Thu 27th Oct 2005

Nick Baker

Nick Baker, a British citizen imprisoned in Japan on a false charge of drug smuggling, has today had his sentence reduced by an appeal court after spending over three years in a Tokyo jail. He has protested his innocence throughout. The original sentence of fourteen years with hard labour and a fine of 5 million yen has now been reduced to 11 years and a fine of 3 million yen. The three and a half years Nick has already served will be taken into account.

Liberal Democrat European justice spokeswoman, Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, has campaigned on Nick's behalf since 2002, and visited Japan in 2003 in an attempt to get him a fair trial. She said:

"The reduced sentence shows at least some acknowledgement of the frailty of the case against Nick, but the Court has missed an opportunity to overturn a gross miscarriage of justice. I am very disappointed indeed that he has not been acquitted."

Following Nick's appeal hearing which ended in June, his Japanese lawyer Shunji Miyake believed there was a 50% chance that Nick's original sentence would be overturned. Sarah Ludford added:

"The Japanese justice system is in dire need of reform. Criminal cases have a 99% conviction rate, and all those accused are presumed guilty. Nick's case in particular has been devoid of proper legal safeguards."

"There has been more than three years of tireless campaigning to try to ensure a fair trial, especially by Nick's mother Iris to whom I pay tribute. But justice has still not been done, and this is a stain on the reputation of Japan."

Notes

Nick Baker was arrested in Tokyo in April 2002 on drug-smuggling charges. He was convicted after being interrogated for 23 days without a lawyer and with no taping of the interview. At the end he signed a document which was not translated and which he therefore did not understand. He has always asserted his innocence, alleging he was duped by his travel companion into carrying the bag in which more than 40,000 ecstasy tablets and nearly a kilo of cocaine were found. The prosecution acknowledged the bag was not Nick's.

Nick was held for 10 months in solitary confinement for protesting his innocence. Interpretation at the trial was totally inadequate. Vital evidence was ignored, such as the activities and record of his travel companion. The trial was unfair in that the case was biased towards the prosecution: criminal cases in Japan have a 99% conviction rate. The judge who presided over the court that found Nick guilty has not acquitted a single defendant in over 10 years.

In June 2003, Nick was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years in prison with forced labour, largely on the basis of the testimony that he protests was inaccurately translated. At his appeal, a Japanese professor of linguistics has stated that the court's translation of Nick's evidence substantially deviated from what he said, and put him in a negative light.

Prison conditions are extremely hard and are run with an elaborate system of punishments. Nick was forbidden from making phone calls home, was forced to sit cross legged on a concrete floor for endless hours and suffers from frostbite to his fingers and feet. He was not allowed to keep his asthma inhaler in his cell, and so had to call for a guard every time he has an asthma attack, even when unable to breathe.

The appeal hearings were also been dogged by inadequacies. At the first one in March 2004, the court translator was inaudible as she read through the defence argument, and the judge instructed her stop before the end as the session had run out of time. In response to critical comments about this translator on the "Justice for Nick Baker" website, the Tokyo High Court informed Nick's legal team two days before the second hearing that the translator had 'resigned' and, as there was no replacement, the hearing would be cancelled. At the October 2004 hearing, in response to cross-examination, Officer Kawashima, who was in charge of the customs seizure and who signed the confiscation report, replied "I don't remember" 46 times on the witness stand.