The Supreme Court's rare apology this week to former leprosy patients for authorizing "special trials" outside standard courtrooms for criminally accused patients of the disease from the 1940s to the 1970s fails to delve into the question of whether the patients were given fair trials under the nation's decades-long segregation policy that officially ended just 20 years ago. The top court belatedly admitted that it violated the law governing court procedures in rubber-stumping lower court requests for the patients' trials — often held in isolated sanitariums to which the patients were confined. But its refusal to acknowledge that the special proceedings ran counter to the principle of open trials as guaranteed by the Constitution centers on technicalities and ignores the conditions in which the patients were placed under the policy.

Also known as the Hansen's disease, leprosy is a chronic infectious disease whose symptoms include granulomas of the skin but it is only mildly contagious. Based on the misconception that it was contagious and incurable, the 1931 Leprosy Prevention Law confined the patients to government-run sanitariums. The segregation policy was maintained in the postwar version of the law — even though by the late 1940s an effective cure of the disease became widely available — until the law was repealed in 1996, all the while subjecting the patients and their families to social prejudice and discrimination.

A 2001 Kumamoto District Court ruling that acknowledged the unconstitutionality of the segregation policy at least since 1960 — when it was established that leprosy was a curable disease — prompted the government to offer an apology and the Diet to enact a law to compensate the former patients. But the judiciary has remained mum on its practice of holding criminal trials of patients in special settings — until it began its probe two years ago at the urging of a group of former patients, who charge that the trials were mostly held in effectively closed circumstances in violation of the constitutional principle of open trials.