Thanks to everyone's donations, we have reached our second fundraising goal.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude once again for your tremendous support.

After filing an appeal against the appellate court's judgment, I submitted the statement of grounds for appeal and the statement of grounds for the petition for acceptance of appeal in April of last year (2025).

Since then, I have submitted supplementary statements of reasons four times, but so far there has been no progress in the process.

We will promptly inform you of any further developments.

We look forward to your continued support.

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 [Message from Mr. Eguchi]

 To all those who have supported us

Last February, we increased our fundraising goal to include seeking advice from psychology experts.

Thanks to the continued warm support we received from everyone, we were able to have Professor Yasushi Ohashi, a specialist in psychology, write two opinion papers, which we then submitted to the Supreme Court.

Furthermore, we recently reached our goal of 2 million yen in total donations.

We are deeply grateful for the tremendous support you have given us up to this point.

Also, I recently donated a portion of the royalties from my book "The Shoebill in the Interrogation Room" to CALL4 and the "End Hostage Justice!" lawsuit case.

Our efforts to eliminate illegal interrogations and hostage justice will continue.

We will continue to do our utmost to obtain a Supreme Court ruling that "it is not permissible to continue questioning after the exercise of the right to remain silent."

Please continue to follow along.

Yamato Eguchi

On December 29th of last year, we submitted Supplementary Statement of Appeal (4) to the Supreme Court.

A supplementary opinion letter from Professor Yasushi Ohashi is attached as a reference.

In addition, plaintiff Eguchi-san would like to inform everyone as follows:

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To everyone who supports us

Thank you so much for watching over and supporting me for so long.

This book compiles what I saw and felt during my interrogation and detention, as well as the steps I took to bring about this lawsuit questioning the right to remain silent in Japan.

"Shoebill in the Interrogation Room: If I Stay Silent, It'll Be Destroyed. A Lawyer's 250 Days of Detention"

It was released on January 7, 2026.

https://bookpub.jiji.com/book/ b670017.html

I hope that this book will serve as a tool to bring about some change in Japan's criminal justice system.

Royalties from this book will be donated to activities and organizations working to end hostage justice (including CALL4).

If you would like, I would appreciate it if you would pick up a copy and let anyone who is interested know about it.

Today, an opinion paper by Yasushi Ohashi (Professor at Shukutoku University) was submitted to the Supreme Court.

Please refer to the file "Supplementary Statement of Grounds for Appeal (3) - Opinion of Professor Ohashi Yasushi" published in the "Supreme Court" section of the lawsuit documents.

So far, we have discussed what the proper interpretation of the Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure should be, stating that it is not permissible to force interrogation on a suspect who is exercising his right to remain silent.

In his opinion, Mr. Ohashi argues, based on psychological findings, that forcing interrogations and subjecting suspects to "pressure" severely violates their right to free decision-making.

We will continue to consider additional claims and evidence.

We appreciate your continued support.

We submitted the Supplementary Statement of Grounds for Appeal (2) and the Supplementary Statement of Grounds for Acceptance of Appeal (2) to the Supreme Court.

 We argued that the so-called "denying the obligation to endure interrogation theory" has persuasively discussed the relationship between the right to remain silent and interrogation, while the "affirming the obligation to endure interrogation theory" has not sufficiently considered the relationship between the right to remain silent and coercive interrogation and is therefore weakly based.

 We will continue to ask the Supreme Court to make a straightforward judgment on the relationship between the right to remain silent and coercive interrogation, without being bound by the weakly-founded ``theory affirming the obligation to endure interrogation'' or the Supreme Court's ruling of March 24, 1999, which is merely a dictum.

We appreciate your continued support.

A notice of appeal was filed yesterday with the Supreme Court.
Since the content is also related to the application for acceptance of appeal, we also submitted the same content as a supplementary statement of reasons for the application for acceptance of appeal.

As stated in the document, in regards to our application to the Prosecutor Qualifications Review Board regarding the illegal and improper interrogation of Mr. Eguchi, we were notified of the board's simple conclusion: "It was not found that there were circumstances that warranted review by this review board."
It was not made clear what action the prosecutor's office took in response to this incident.
Once again, we believe that it is essential that the Supreme Court make a decision to prevent the same situation from happening again. We plan to continue to make supplementary submissions.

We appreciate your continued support.

Thank you for your support in our lawsuit questioning Japan's "right to remain silent."

We would like to report that today we submitted the grounds for appeal and the grounds for acceptance of the appeal and have posted them as litigation documents.

We plan to continue making further submissions so that we can obtain a decision from the Supreme Court on the significance of the right to remain silent.

We appreciate your continued support.

We would like to report that as of today, we have filed an appeal and a request for acceptance of the appeal.

We will do our utmost to ask the Supreme Court to consider the meaning of the right to remain silent.

We look forward to your continued support.

We are a legal team challenging Japan's "right to remain silent."

Since the case page was launched in March 2024, we have received your kind support, which has enabled us to translate foreign precedents and submit them as evidence, as well as to hold presentations and publish videos to provide detailed information on the results of first instance judgments. We would like to express our deepest gratitude for your support.

Unfortunately, the recent appeal court ruling did not properly address my claim that my right to remain silent was violated. I would like to appeal this decision and ask the Supreme Court to make a direct ruling on the issue of the violation of my right to remain silent.

In the appeal hearing, in addition to deepening the discussions that have taken place so far, we would like to seek the opinions of experts in psychology and international human rights law to provide more comprehensive evidence that interrogation after the exercise of the right to remain silent is a violation of human rights and is therefore unacceptable.

In order to cover the costs of these activities (especially soliciting expert advice), we ask for your continued support.

We will continue to question the current situation regarding the right to remain silent in Japan in order to improve it. We ask for your support so that we can move this activity forward even further.

Today's appeal decision will be published in the "Litigation Materials" and "High Court" columns.

A video of the press conference held by Eguchi and his attorney after the verdict has been posted below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hm9iVpIq7Q

We would like to ask for your continued support as we move forward with the appeal process.

The appeal court decision was handed down today (February 6, 2025).

The main ruling was that "the appeal is dismissed," and the contents of the first instance ruling were upheld.

Regarding the relationship between the continuation of interrogation and the right to remain silent, for which we sought a ruling, the court merely repeated the contents of the first-instance ruling and unfortunately no substantive ruling was made.

File an appeal and seek a Supreme Court decision.

We will post the verdict and video of the post-verdict press conference as soon as possible.

We appreciate your continued support.