The Japanese Olympic Committee is considering holding a large-scale half marathon in Tokyo to boost the Japanese capital’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Games, it was learned Friday.

The JOC wants to jointly stage the event featuring around 30,000 competitors with the Olympians Association of Japan and is looking to pencil in the race for mid-September. The International Olympic Committee will select the host city for the 2016 Games in October at its general assembly in Copenhagen. To help gather momentum for Tokyo’s bid, the proposal involves Olympians from various sports helping with the operation of the event by distributing water and offering encouragement to general runners in the race, according to sources close to the matter.

No to capital punishment
No death by Hanging
No Tokyo Olympics

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Japanese Olympic Committee President Tsunekazu Takeda plans to ask outspoken Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara to make a presentation in Lausanne, Switzerland, in June for the Japanese capital’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. ‘‘We need Governor Ishihara, who is also the bid committee chief, to make an appeal,’’ Takeda said Monday, referring to the occasion when the four finalist cities will be granted the opportunity to speak before International Olympic Committee members.

The IOC will name the host city of the 2016 Olympics from among Tokyo, Chicago, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro at its general assembly meeting in Copenhagen in October 2009. ‘‘I believe the governor knows he is the one. He is a charismatic person known even to the media overseas,’’ said Mitsuru Arakawa, a senior official of the 2016 Tokyo Olympics campaign.
Tokyo is bidding for the 2016 Olympic Games but Japan should look at basic Human Rights Issues and only then after international events!

Amnesty International argues that the Japanese justice system tends to place great reliance on confessions and it has been claimed that these may be obtained under duress. According to a 2005 Amnesty International report:

“Most have been sentenced to death on the basis of confessions extracted under duress. The potential for miscarriages of justice is built into the system: confessions are typically extracted while suspects are held in daiyo kangoku, or “substitute prisons”, for interrogation before they are charged. In practice these are police cells, where detainees can be held for up to 23 days after arrest, with no state-funded legal representation. They are typically interrogated for 12 hours a day: no lawyers can be present, no recordings are made, and they are put under constant pressure to confess. Once convicted, it is very difficult to obtain a re-trial and prisoners can remain under sentence of death for many years.”

Amnesty International also reports of allegations of abuse of suspects during these interrogations. There are reports of physical abuse, sleep deprivation and denial of food, water and use of a toilet. It also criticises the fact that inmates usually remain for years, sometimes decades, on death row, knowing that executions come with little warning and each day may potentially be their last. According to Amnesty International, the intense and prolonged stress means many inmates on death row have poor mental health, suffering from the so called Death row phenomenon. The failure to give advanced notice of executions has been stated by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to be incompatible with articles 2, 7, 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

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