THE RIGHT TO SILENCE AND THE HIGH CONVICTION RATE IN JAPANESE CRIMINAL JUSTICE Paulo Moreira

Abstract

The present paper addresses the Japanese idiosyncrasy revolving the defendants’ right to silence, aiming to embrace both the jurisprudential practice and the theoretical conceptualization from both jurists and the Japanese people and its reflexes on the Japanese criminal justice’s conviction rate. The author exposes the legal and the factual obstacles he sees against a concretization of the right to silence following the modern western model, compares the historical environment in which that right came to flourish in Brazil and in Japan, and strives to expose in as much detail as possible the spirit that lies beneath each of these legal systems that, although being so different from each other, aspire just in the same way towards reaching the ideal of “right”, that is, the ideal of what is “just”.