Japan's Supreme Court on Friday handed down a rare acquittal to a young Vietnamese woman who was convicted of abandoning her stillborn twins after a clandestine birth at her home.
Le Thi Thuy Linh, 24, had been given a three-month suspended prison sentence in January 2022 in a case that had been held up as an example of the pressures faced by women participating in Japan's so-called "technical trainee"
program
.
“Technical courses”
She had appealed her conviction and was acquitted on Friday, a Supreme Court spokesman told AFP.
The decision was hailed by her lawyers and supporters, who waited outside holding banners that read "
Linh is innocent
".
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The Japanese system known as "
technical internships
", which at the end of 2021 had around 275,000 workers from countries including China and Vietnam, is supposed to provide foreign participants with experience in a field that will be useful to them back in their country.
But it is above all, according to its detractors, a source of cheap labor for companies in Japan, where the population is aging and there are few migrants.
Many controversies
This program has been peppered with numerous controversies, with accusations of discrimination and violence.
Some trainees have even been brought in to work on the decontamination of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, devastated by a tsunami in 2011.
Women are further pressured not to become pregnant, risking losing their place in the program.
Le Thi Thuy Linh was working on a farm in Kumamoto (southwest Japan) when she found out she was pregnant in July 2020.
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She feared that her family would be "
financially destroyed
" if she was deported because of her pregnancy, her lawyer Hiroshi Ishiguro told AFP last year.
She unsuccessfully took abortion pills and hid her pregnancy from her employer, who, suspecting she was pregnant, had warned her of "
difficulties
" to come, according to the lawyer.
She eventually delivered the stillborn twins at her home, and was reported to the police when she sought medical help the following day.
