Lucy McKernan is the deputy director for the United Nations at Human Rights Watch. Teppei Kasai is an Asia program officer at Human Rights Watch.
On Jan. 27, Japan's Foreign Ministry said it informed the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights not to allocate any of Japan's voluntary funds to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (the CEDAW Committee). The request followed the committee's recommendation in 2024 that Japan should revise the country's Imperial House Law, which stipulates that only men can be successors to Japan's throne. The government had protested the committee's recommendation, urging it to delete it from its report.
