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Japan to fully revise basic IT Law for 1st time

Shinzo Abe instructed the submission of a bill to amend the law to next year's regular session of the Diet, Japan's parliament.
Shinzo Abe instructed the submission of a bill to amend the law to next year's regular session of the Diet, Japan's parliament.
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16 Jul 2020 03:07:45 GMT9
16 Jul 2020 03:07:45 GMT9

TOKYO: The Japanese government on Wednesday set out plans to fully revise the basic law on the promotion of information technologies for the first time, in order to accelerate social reforms through digitization.

The government drew up a new IT strategy at the day’s joint meeting of its IT strategy headquarters, headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and other panels. Abe instructed the submission of a bill to amend the law to next year’s regular session of the Diet, Japan’s parliament.

“I felt keenly the lack of citizen-oriented digitization of administrative procedures,” Abe said, noting the government’s failure to smoothly process online applications for cash handouts intended as a relief measure in the fight against the novel coronavirus epidemic.

Abe said that the government will intensively advance reforms of the My Number social security and taxation identification system and other systems over the next year. “The biggest factor impeding citizen-oriented administrative digitization is dispersed information systems,” he added, urging members to draw up by year-end guidelines for integrating relevant systems at the central and local governments.

The new IT strategy lays out specific measures to beef up digitization by area. In the area of education, the government aims to make a personal computer or tablet device available to each student of elementary and junior high schools by the end of fiscal 2020.

In the labor category, the government will establish a team of IT experts to promote the adoption of digital technologies by small companies and microbusinesses as many such firms are finding it difficult to introduce remote working.

In disaster reduction, the government will increase the utilization of chatbots, or services that use artificial intelligence to automatically respond to questions sent through social media by disaster victims.

The new strategy also calls for starting this fiscal year deliberations on digitizing procedures related to criminal investigations and trials, such as the seeking of search and arrest warrants by law-enforcement authorities. Specifics will be discussed among officials from entities including the Justice Ministry, the National Police Agency, the Supreme Court and the Japan Federation of Bar Associations.
JIJI Press

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