Gov’t to submit bills on defense cooperation with U.S

TOKYO, March 13 Kyodo

The government Friday expressed its intention to submit to the Diet within three months bills to legislate domestic laws governing the updated guidelines for defense cooperation with the United States, Foreign Ministry officials said.

During a series of talks in Tokyo of the bilateral Subcommittee for Defense Cooperation and the Security Subcommittee at the bureau deputy director general-level, Japan told the U.S. that it plans to refer the measures to the Diet during the ongoing 150-day ordinary parliamentary session which runs through June 10, the ministry officials said.

The bills being considered include one that would result in a law stipulating under what situations, in undefined “areas surrounding Japan,” the country will provide U.S. forces with logistic support, the officials quoted Japanese negotiators as saying.

The guidelines, updated in September, say Japan will provide logistic support to the U.S. in the event of an emergency in the region.

The law will also specify procedures under which Japan will provide the support.

The Japanese government also envisions submitting to parliament a bill to amend the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) law so that SDF vessels can legally carry Japanese evacuees and refugees in an emergency.

Due to a tight parliamentary schedule, it is uncertain whether the government can submit all of intended bills to the Diet before it wraps up June 10.

However, senior officials of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) said Friday the government is aiming at submission of the bills before the “Golden Week” holidays, which extend from April 29 to May 5.

LDP Secretary General Koichi Kato and LDP Policy Research Council Chairman Taku Yamasaki made the remarks in separate meetings with Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian and Pacific affairs, who was in Japan to discuss security issues.

Yamasaki was quoted as saying three or four bills are likely to be submitted.

During Friday’s security talks, Japan and the U.S. also vowed to cooperate in updating the June 1996 Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) during the same time period, according to government officials.

The pact currently provides for mutual logistic support of supplies and services only in peacetime.

It therefore needs to be revised or replaced with a new treaty in order to have it apply in an emergency.

Japan also pledged that it will continue efforts to obtain understanding from local residents on the planned construction of a U.S. offshore military heliport in Okinawa Prefecture, the officials said.

The U.S. side agreed to continue supporting the Japanese central government’s stance to search for ways to build a sea-based heliport off the U.S. Marine Corps’ Camp Schwab in the city of Nago in Japan’s southwestern island prefecture of Okinawa despite resistance from local residents.

The heliport construction has been proposed in order to relocate the helicopter operations of the Futemma Marine Corps Air Station, located in the city of Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture.

Washington agreed in December 1996 to close the Futemma base in five to seven years on condition that the helicopter operations be relocated to another site in the prefecture

Howard attack on European powers

Michael Howard, the most senior Euro-sceptic in the Cabinet, is in conflict with the government’s law officers and some ministers over a radical new proposal which could significantly reduce the influence of the European Court of Justice in Britain. The Home Secretary, a persistent critic of the European Court, has circulated a paper to Cabinet colleagues proposing changes to the 1972 European Communities Act that would prevent courts reaching findings based on European, rather than domestic law.

Leading Article: Too many fishers on the sea

The great fish finger war of ‘95 is difficult to take seriously: shots fired, trawlers arrested, warships ordered to sea, pompous exchanges in the House of Commons, European-Canadian contacts frozen – all for the right to trawl for an obscure kind of fish among the icebergs of the North Atlantic. But this, remember, is the latest in a long line of piscine squabbles: fish geo-politics will be a recurring theme of the Nineties.

The issues in dispute 300 miles east of Newfoundland are (as always with fish politics) as slippery as a trawler’s deck. The Canadians have no right to pass domestic laws and enforce them in international waters: Tory MPs who cheered Canada may remember that Britain fought two Cod Wars in the 1970s to assert that principle. On the other hand, the vast Spanish fleet, as large as all other European Union fleets combined, is notoriously ill-disciplined. The Spanish owners’ threat yesterday to send all their deep-water vessels lumbering into the disputed zone was stupidly unhelpful. The once bountiful cod and flounder stocks of the Grand Banks have already been hoovered up (mostly by American boats). The EU should be more sensitive to Canadian anxieties about the remaining stocks of turbot (or, as stubborn European fish experts insist, Greenland Halibut).

The rights and wrongs of the wider issues are more easily grasped. We are fighting with the Canadians over turbot because stocks of the fish we prefer to eat are at desperately low levels. The combination of failed international control policies, increased boat numbers and hi-tech trawling – sonar spotting of fish shoals, powerful engines and huge lightweight nets – have scoured the seven seas of cod, haddock and tuna. According to the UN, 70 per cent of world fish stocks are endangered, the number of fishing boats in the world has doubled in the past 20 years, and the EU has 40 per cent more vessels than its stocks can sustain.

Fish respect no national limits; they must be conserved and managed internationally. Fisheries ministers from 80 nations will meet in Rome next week to discuss a voluntary code for protection of the remaining stocks. A voluntary code, if enforced by national or EU laws, would be a step forward. But a fundamental change of approach is also needed.

International fisheries policies – including the EU Common Fisheries Policy – have had some successes. But mostly they have failed. They have failed because they have been based on the principle of restricting overall catches and dividing them into national catch quotas. This is almost impossible to enforce. It has proved as effective as squeezing fish paste back into the tube. Some sort of overall catch limits are essential but they must be enforced by limiting, and licensing, the numbers of boats: in other words, by establishing quotas of fishermen, not quotas of fish.