14 - An Injunction Banning a Xenophobic Group from Demonstrating

Summary

Among the cases at which the author looks in this chapter is one in which a district court issued an injunction against a hate demonstration attacking Koreans planned for an area in which many Koreans live. The decision referred to the right of Korean residents to live in their houses in peace. It referred to the Hate Speech Elimination Act and did not recognize the hate demonstration as expression to be protected constitutionally. In this way, the court privileged the personal right over the constitutional freedom, regarding the ‘peace’ to which these individuals were entitled as including a freedom from mental harm. Moreover, the court held that the feelings and beliefs harboured by those with roots outside of Japan toward their ethnicity are deeply rooted in individual dignity. This enabled it to decide that the hate demonstration’s infringement of the right to dignity was serious. The author criticizes this reasoning and asks whether the court’s use of the Act does not go too far. He proposes instead that the most relevant detail of the case was the fact that the demonstration was planned for an area in which many Koreans are resident, meaning that the utterance of hate speech there would arouse a very real sense of fear and infringe their concrete rights.