Japan’s Diet Enacts Referendum Reform Bill

Tokyo, July 24 (Jiji Press)–The Diet, Japan’s parliament, on Friday enacted a bill to ease the requirements on appointing poll watchers for national referendums on amending the Constitution. The bill to revise the national referendum law was approved by a majority vote at the day’s plenary meeting of the House of Councillors, the upper parliamentary chamber, with support from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its ally, the Japan Innovation Party, as well as the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and Komeito from the opposition side. The legislation cleared the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, last month. This is the first revision of the law since June 2021. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has pledged to pave the way by next spring for the Diet to propose a constitutional revision, and the ruling coalition plans to make necessary preparations. The revised law relaxes the requirements for selecting vote-counting witnesses in the event that ballot boxes cannot be transported from remote islands due to bad weather and for picking vote watchers in case of shortages of such monitors. It also allows the use of FM broadcasting for publicizing national referendums. The revision was intended to align the requirements with those under the public offices election law. As the legislation did not include restrictions on online ads for referendums, a supplementary resolution was adopted when it was approved by the Upper House Commission on the Constitution on Wednesday. The resolution calls for necessary measures, including legal revisions, to be taken, following the rapid development of artificial intelligence. During the current parliamentary session, the LDP and the JIP, based on their coalition agreement reached last October, aimed to set up constitutional amendment drafting panels under the Constitution commissions of both Diet chambers. But they gave up the plan due to strong resistance from some opposition parties. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]