Japan collective defence ban outdated-panel head

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

TOKYO, May 21 (Reuters) Japan's self-imposed ban on exercising the right to collective self-defence, or aiding an ally under attack, is outdated and needs to be revised, an adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said today.

Abe, who has made rewriting Japan's post-World War Two pacifist constitution a key goal, appointed Shunji Yanai to head a panel of experts to review the ban on collective self-defence, The United States, Japan's closest security ally, has made clear it would welcome and end to the ban.

''Many members said that ... international relations and the security environment are totally different from 60 years ago'' when the constitution was promulgated, Yanai said in a speech, commenting on the panel's first meeting last Friday.

''Overall, we talked about how international relations and the security environment had undergone major change and therefore the interpretation that Japan's constitution only allows individual self-defence will no longer hold,'' Yanai said through an interpreter. The panel's conclusions are expected in the autumn.

Abe himself has made clear that he wants to find ways to further loosen the limits of the US-drafted, 1947 constitution even before it can be amended, a change that will take years.

Yanai, a former Japanese ambassador to the United States, echoed that view. ''The process for amendment is very difficult.

Two-thirds of the members of parliament need to propose it and a majority of voters need to approve it,'' he said.

''If we are to resolve the challenges immediately in front of us, we cannot wait for amendment of the constitution because that is a much longer process.'' Critics have charged the discussion was over before it began, but Yanai and other panel members say the planned deployment of a US-Japan missile defence system makes easing the ban an urgent matter.

Abe has cited four scenarios that he wants reviewed, including one in which a ballistic missile is launched and might be headed for US territory rather than Japanese soil.

Parliament last week enacted a law outlining steps for a referendum on revising the constitution, but under the new law, no vote would be held for at least three years.

Japanese voters are divided on the need to change Article 9, which renounces the right to wage war to resolve international disputes and bans the maintenance of a military.

The article has been interpreted as allowing armed forces solely for self-defence, and successive governments have already stretched its limits by such steps as sending non-combat troops to Iraq on a reconstruction mission.

REUTERS RJ KP1748

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