Judicial barriers to inclusive education as a human right: An analysis of relevant legal cases in Japan

Abstract

Article 24 of the CRPD guarantees inclusive education as a fundamental human right. In Japan, the education policy has shifted from a segregated education to an inclusive one with the ratification of the CRPD. However, recent lawsuits on children with disabilities and their school placement/attendance reveal such policy changes are not reflected in practice. In this article, we reviewed notable court cases in Japan to investigate how Japanese courts interpreted the reform of the legal system. We divide the article into two parts: Firstly, we describe the history of Japanese education reform. Secondly, we discuss the court cases with regard to Japanese education system reform and the schooling of children with disabilities over three time periods. Our findings show that the court continues to make judicial decisions based on the old notion of segregated education and fails to recognize or even understand that inclusive education is a fundamental human right.

Points of interest

• Inclusive education should be a human right, but many countries, including Japan, still have school systems where students are segregated.

• The history of changes in laws on Japanese schooling system is explained.

• This study analyzed the main purports of legal cases about school attendance of children with disabilities in Japan and its changes over time.

• This study found that the court’s decisions made after the changes in laws to schooling system in Japan still did not adequately reflect its philosophy of inclusive education as a human right.

• The study recommends that it is necessary to have open discussions about ‘inclusive education’ as a human right.

Keywords:

• Human rights
• inclusive education
• court litigation
• reasonable accommodation
• symbiotic society

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI [Grant Number 19K02913].