From The Japan Times, 2/11/17.
An independent committee said Friday that an NHK TV program committed a human rights violation against disgraced biologist Haruko Obokata, who claimed to have discovered a faster way to generate iPS cells that can grow into any tissue in the human body.
The human rights committee of the Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization judged that the program defamed her and decided to issue an advisory urging NHK to prevent similar incidents.
It was the first time that the ethics group has recognized a human rights violation in a program produced by the public broadcaster.
“We see here a human rights violation of defamation,” its report said.
The program, broadcast in July 2014, investigated alleged fraud in Obokata’s research on so-called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) published in the scientific journal Nature.
Obokata, a former researcher at Riken, a top state-backed research institute, submitted a complaint to the ethics group claiming that the program was produced to show that she had stolen embryonic stem cells to conduct her STAP experiments.
NHK rejected her claim, saying it produced the program using objective facts and used care in the expressions it used.
The program investigated allegedly fraudulent acts related to embryonic stem cells found at Obokata’s laboratory office.
The ethics committee concluded that the evidence presented by NHK was insufficient to support the claim that Obokata stole embryonic stem cells.
Furthermore, the committee said NHK’s news-gathering activities, which saw TV crews hounding Obokata, were problematic in terms of broadcasting ethics.
Saying NHK may have intended not only to seek the scientific truth, but also to make Obokata look like a fraud, the ethics committee urged it to reconsider its news-gathering and broadcasting techniques when media coverage is excessive.
“I appreciate the fair conclusion,” Obokata said through her agent in response to the panel’s findings. The NHK program’s “impact on my life will never disappear,” she said.
Obokata does not intend to file a lawsuit at the moment, lawyer Hideo Miki said.
Source: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/02/11/national/nhk-violated-obokatas-rights-broadcasting-ethics-panel/
Showing posts with label defamation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defamation. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
"NHK ordered to pay damages to indigenous Taiwanese woman for defaming her"
From Japan Today, 11/30/13:
A Japanese court has ordered public broadcaster NHK to pay damages to an indigenous Taiwanese woman for defaming her by using the term “human zoo” in a program, officials said Friday.
Overturning a lower court ruling, the Tokyo High Court ordered NHK to pay 1 million yen to the woman, with presiding judge Noriaki Sudo reportedly saying the broadcaster used a term that had a “serious discriminatory meaning”.
The program looked at the “Japan-Britain Exhibition” held in London in 1910 to which Japan took several members of Taiwan’s aboriginal population, including the father of the woman, as exotic exhibits, Jiji Press and Kyodo News reported.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony at the time, and the practice of exhibiting the little-known peoples of far-flung territories was a common one among Western imperial powers.
Historians say Japan, which had emerged from self-imposed isolation just half a century earlier, joined in partly as an attempt to establish itself as an imperial power and mitigate the perceived risk of being colonised itself.
In the ruling, Sudo said NHK “repeatedly used the term without giving consideration to its discriminatory meaning,” which implied the people of the Paiwan—Taiwan’s indigenous population—were uncivilized, the Tokyo Shimbun reported.
Some of those who took part did so earnestly, and not as mere curiosities, the judge said, according to the paper.
In a statement sent to AFP on Friday, NHK said: “We are sorry that our argument was not taken up. We will decide how to deal with the issue after studying closely the court’s verdict.”
Source: http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/nhk-ordered-to-pay-damages-to-indigenous-taiwanese-woman-for-defaming-her
A Japanese court has ordered public broadcaster NHK to pay damages to an indigenous Taiwanese woman for defaming her by using the term “human zoo” in a program, officials said Friday.
Overturning a lower court ruling, the Tokyo High Court ordered NHK to pay 1 million yen to the woman, with presiding judge Noriaki Sudo reportedly saying the broadcaster used a term that had a “serious discriminatory meaning”.
The program looked at the “Japan-Britain Exhibition” held in London in 1910 to which Japan took several members of Taiwan’s aboriginal population, including the father of the woman, as exotic exhibits, Jiji Press and Kyodo News reported.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony at the time, and the practice of exhibiting the little-known peoples of far-flung territories was a common one among Western imperial powers.
Historians say Japan, which had emerged from self-imposed isolation just half a century earlier, joined in partly as an attempt to establish itself as an imperial power and mitigate the perceived risk of being colonised itself.
In the ruling, Sudo said NHK “repeatedly used the term without giving consideration to its discriminatory meaning,” which implied the people of the Paiwan—Taiwan’s indigenous population—were uncivilized, the Tokyo Shimbun reported.
Some of those who took part did so earnestly, and not as mere curiosities, the judge said, according to the paper.
In a statement sent to AFP on Friday, NHK said: “We are sorry that our argument was not taken up. We will decide how to deal with the issue after studying closely the court’s verdict.”
Source: http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/nhk-ordered-to-pay-damages-to-indigenous-taiwanese-woman-for-defaming-her
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