MEP Emma Bonino said she encountered a wall of silence...

MEP Emma Bonino said she encountered a wall of silence in her efforts to discuss the death penalty with Japanese authorities.
"I only got no for an answer when I requested a meeting with death row inmates and to visit the place where executions are carried out," the former EU Human Rights commissioner fumed.
"I was only able to meet the director of the Tokyo prison who offered to show me an empty death row cell. At this point I believe that the best way forward is a UN moratorium on executions."
Ms Bonino met the deputy justice minister Keichi Tadaki as justice minister Mayumi Moriyama said she would not meet the MEP "this time."
"Tadeki told me that death row inmates can't have visitors because visits harm their psychic and emotional equilibrium," Ms Bonino said.
The refusal to allow a visit to the execution place was motivated by place being "sacred and imbued with dignity."
Ms Bonino and Social Democrat MP Nobuto Hosaka, a member of the 98-strong parliamentarian league for the abolition of the death penalty, denounced the secrecy of the application of the death penalty in Japan. It remains one of the few countries where capital punishment is surrounded by maximum secrecy which denies the prisoners' human dignity and basic rights, they said. Prisoners are isolated, rarely allowed family visits and are only told on the morning of the day of their execution that by midday they will hang.
"If we made executions public, there's the risk that public opinion, now massively in favour of the death penalty, turns around," Tadaki said.
Hosaka said that draft legislation for the substitution of the death penalty by a life term will be tabled in parliament during the ongoing session.
"I'm sure that then even Japanese media, which are conspicuous by their silence on the issue, will be forced to acknowledge the problem," he said.