KOREMATSU V. UNITED STATES: BETWEEN DISCRIMINATION AND LEGAL SECURITY

Abstract

“Korematsu v. United States” is one of the most important and precedential cases in the history of United States in terms of introducing new legal practices and approaches, as well as raising people's legal and cultural awareness. This is a case that is similar in content to other controversial and almost discriminatory rulings in recent U.S. jurisprudence, but differs substantially from most of them in its paradigmatic and historical significance. Korematsu v. United States has been viewed in the US history as a model of the opposition between the need to ensure national security and the individual rights of full-fledged citizen of the country. It can be said that today the decision is completely overcome in formally, however there is a big gap between the formal overcoming of the decision and the complete exhaustion of the disputed issue within the legal society (which can only be achieved by implementing new laws and moving to a new stage of legal development). The prelude to all this was the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Air Force launched an attack against the United States Pacific Fleet, based in the waters of Oahu Island, the capital of Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. It is safe to say that out of the losses incurred in one particular operation in the history of the United States, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan ended in the most tragic consequences for the United States. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order N9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to so called internment camps because they were a vulnerable group for the Japanese Intelligence Agencies, which the authorities claimed posed a potential threat to the national security. Fred Toyasaburo Korematsu was born is Oakland, California on January 30, 1919. He was a Japanese American civil rights activist, who actively resisted the execution of Order N9066 and, unlike his parents, refused to leave his place of residence and move to Internment camp, which later served as a reason for his arrest. It is still disputed whether the decision and the executive order N9066 on the relocation of Americans of Japanese descent were motivated by discrimination or the state acted simply out of a need to ensure National Security. As already mentioned, it all depends on which side we look at the overall picture from.