Online harassment is becoming increasingly prevalent globally. In response, governments worldwide have been implementing various measures against online harassment. These measures include creating online speech regulations, requiring platforms to increase transparency in their content moderation, strengthening the rights of victims of online harms vis-à-vis platforms.

Each of these new measures should be continually reviewed to ensure their efficacy and strict compliance with existing human rights or domestic constitutional norms; however, among those measures, at least one has already proven to be problematic—strengthening or actively enforcing criminal insult laws.

Originating from Roman law, the criminalization of insults gained popularity in early European countries as a means to protect the nobility, and later, the monarchy. However, as liberal democracy and egalitarianism have become the norms in contemporary times, insult laws have become less relevant, as the legal interests they were intended to protect have diminished or disappeared. Not only have insult laws become obsolete, but they are increasingly recognized as harmful due to their vagueness. There is a well-established norm advocating for the abolition of such laws, which has emerged from a long history of condemnation by international, regional, and domestic bodies that have criticized these laws for being misused by governments or public officials to suppress dissenting voices. While many countries still enforce these laws today, key democratic nations have abolished them, limited their application or enforcement, allowed them to become dormant, or never had them in the first place.

Unfortunately, Japan—a liberal democratic country and the world’s fourth-largest economy—has taken this troubling path. In 2022, the Parliament passed a bill that adds up to one year imprisonment to its insult law with the aim to combat online harassments. To share lessons with the international community, this report aims to recap and reaffirm the international human rights norms applicable to insult laws, demonstrate how Japanese criminal insult laws deviate from these norms, illustrate a global trend of decriminalization or limitation of these laws, and suggest key recommendations for Japan to align its insult laws with international human rights law while effectively addressing online harms.

Clinic students Andrew Chan and Clara Baik supported the research and drafting of the report.