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Fukushima disaster: Tepco executives to face trial
Topic Started: 31 Jul 2015, 10:51 PM (65 Views)
skibboy
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Fukushima disaster: Tepco executives to face trial

6 hours ago

Posted Image
The plant was crippled in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami

A trio of former top executives at a Japanese power giant are to appear in court over the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011.

In a rare legal move, a citizen's panel ruled the three Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) officials should face charges.

The decision forces prosecutors who had previously declined to act to seek an indictment.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant suffered a series of meltdowns following a massive earthquake and tsunami.

Tens of thousands of people had to leave their homes in the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine.

'Unusual case'

The judicial panel, made up of ordinary Japanese citizens, allege the three failed to take sufficient preventative measures at the plant while knowing the risks of a tsunami.

It said the men should be charged with professional negligence resulting in death, in what will be the first criminal case involving Tepco officials.

Prosecutors in Tokyo had twice decided against pressing charges, citing insufficient evidence.

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Substantial amounts of radiation leaked into the surrounding area following the disaster

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Work continues at the nuclear plant to this day

But the panel's ruling forces a compulsory indictment of the three, who include 75-year-old former Tepco Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata.

Analysts say guilty verdicts are unlikely, given the prosecutors' previous ruling that the case was not strong enough to pursue.

"This is a very unusual case. The hurdles to conviction are high," Nobuo Gohara, a former prosecutor, told the New York Times.

One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded struck off the coast of Japan in March 2011, triggering a huge tsunami.

Almost 16,000 people died and more than 2,500 are still listed as missing.

None of the deaths however have been linked to the nuclear disaster, although there were a number of deaths in the subsequent evacuation.

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skibboy
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EDITORIAL: Trials of ex-TEPCO bigwigs a chance to take fresh look at disaster

August 01, 2015

Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Co. will stand trial over their criminal responsibility for the 2011 disaster at TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

For the second time, the Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution has rejected an earlier decision by prosecutors not to indict the three, setting the stage for the forced prosecution of these three individuals.

They will be accused of professional negligence resulting in the deaths of people who were in hospitals when the disaster happened and other tragedies.

A report issued by the Diet’s Fukushima nuclear accident investigation committee states, “It is clear that the accident was a man-made disaster.”

But no government officials or TEPCO employees have been punished, either politically or administratively.

In other words, no one has been held accountable for the nation's worst nuclear accident.

Many Japanese citizens still feel that justice has not been meted out with regard to that harrowing disaster.

Many are also concerned that a similar accident may occur again if nobody is held responsible for what happened in 2011.

A second decision by the independent judicial panel of citizens to demand the criminal prosecution of the three former TEPCO executives should be viewed as indicative of the disturbing and disquieting feelings among many citizens.

The system of forced indictment through the judgment of citizens was introduced in 2009, along with the “saiban-in” citizen judge system.

Until that time, public prosecutors monopolized the power to decide whether to indict a suspect.

The new system is intended to ensure that public opinion is reflected in the process of criminal prosecution, at least to a certain degree.

In reversing public prosecutors’ decision not to indict the suspects on grounds that there is no compelling case for holding them liable for negligence, the panel of citizens made a grave decision to force trials of the three individuals.

The court should, of course, consider carefully and fairly whether the former TEPCO executives should be held liable for the misfortunes of disaster victims from the viewpoint of evidence submitted.

At the same time, one question that needs to be asked is how TEPCO implemented measures to protect the nuclear plant from a possible tsunami and ensure the plant’s safety.

Collectively, the trials will offer a great opportunity to take a fresh look into the accident from a perspective that is different from those of the investigation committees set up by the government and the Diet.

There have not been many opportunities for people to talk about the disaster in public.

But the three former TEPCO executives will probably be given opportunities to speak in the courtroom.

The court can also order submission of specific pieces of evidence.

Future public debate on issues concerning nuclear power generation will benefit greatly if the trials uncover unknown facts in the process, such as chronological changes in the utility’s decisions concerning safety measures for its nuclear power plants and the ways the government and other public organizations influenced the company’s policy.

The nation’s judiciary has a long history of handing down rulings related to nuclear power generation.

But in most of the past cases concerning the construction and operations of nuclear power plants, the courts ruled against opposing local residents.

The question is whether all these court rulings in favor of nuclear power were influenced in any way by the perception that there is no way to stop the expansion of electricity production with atomic energy based on the government’s energy policy.

The judiciary’s attitude to nuclear power generation has also been called into question by the accident.

In considering the criminal liabilities related to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which has caused an unprecedented scale of damage, are the traditional criteria, like “specific predictability,” sufficiently effective?

The trials should prompt the judicial community to have more in-depth debate on this question.

We strongly hope the trials will be conducted in a way that lives up to people’s confidence in the judicial system.

Source: The Asahi Shimbun
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skibboy
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Bringing Tepco officials to trial

AUG 6, 2015

A recent decision by a judicial panel of citizens to override repeated decisions by public prosecutors and take former top executives of Tokyo Electric Power Co. to court over the 2011 disaster at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant will end the situation in which no one has been criminally tried for what was characterized as a man-made disaster more than four years after it took place.

The legal hurdles to laying the blame on individual executives aside, the upcoming court proceedings should serve to shed more light on what went on at Tepco that allowed the loss of the emergency power supply and the critical cooling functions at the Fukushima plant in the giant tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake, causing core meltdowns at three of its reactors.

As both the government’s and Diet-commissioned investigations pointed out, much of the causes of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl remains shrouded in mystery, and it should be worthwhile for the court to reexamine the case.

The Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution, comprising 11 randomly selected citizens, voted last month that Tsunehisa Katsumata, Tepco chairman at the time of the 2011 disaster, and two former vice presidents, Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, should be charged with professional negligence resulting in death and injury.

The three will now be indicted by lawyers appointed by the Tokyo District Court to play the role of prosecutors.

Public prosecutors have twice decided not to file criminal charges over the March 2011 disaster.

In 2013, the Tokyo Public Prosecutor’s Office chose not to take action against 42 people, including the Tepco management and former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who had been blamed by Fukushima residents and others for the nuclear catastrophe.

After the criminal accusation was narrowed down to six people, the inquest panel reviewing the prosecutors’ decision voted last year that the three executives should be indicted.

The prosecutors determined in January that their additional probe could not establish a case against the three, prompting the inquest panel with new members to reexamine the decision.

What’s characteristic of the inquest panel’s decision is the high degree of responsibility that it required of a nuclear power plant operator in taking steps to avert a severe accident.

Given the massive damage from such an accident, the panel said the Tepco executives had the duty to guard against a disaster by taking into account even the rarest risks.

Noting that all the executives had been informed by 2009 of an in-house estimate that a tsunami that may hit the No. 1 plant in the event of a major quake can reach as high as 15.7 meters — roughly as big as the maximum 15.5-meter tsunami that hit on March 11, 2011 — the panel accused them of putting the utility’s economic rationale before the plant’s safety and failing to take effective steps to avert the disaster.

The committee cited as victims the 13 workers at the plant and Self-Defense Force rescuers injured in the explosions at the reactors as well as 44 patients at a local hospital who died as their conditions deteriorated during evacuation.

According to court precedents, people can be convicted of professional negligence resulting in death and injury from an accident if they were able to foresee the risk of the accident taking place in concrete terms but failed to take steps to avert it.

Prosecutors twice determined that they had insufficient evidence to prove that the Tepco top executives were able to foresee the risk of an immense tsunami striking the power plant.

The difficulty of establishing the legal case against the three is not likely to change when their case is taken to the court.

The difficulty of overriding prosecutors’ decision and building a criminal case is evident from the track record of charges filed through inquest panel votes.

Only two of the eight cases that were forcibly taken to court since the system was introduced in 2009 have so far resulted in the guilty rulings of the accused being finalized.

That did not discourage the inquest panel from taking the Tepco case to court.

The court must do its best to clarify the circumstances leading to the Fukushima nuclear disaster that remain unexposed.

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