Japan’s Supreme Court upheld an order dissolving the Unification Church as a registered religious corporation on June 22, 2026. The Third Petty Bench described dissolution as necessary and inevitable, finding that the group had failed to prevent donation-solicitation practices that caused extensive financial harm over decades.
Justice Eriko Watanabe said the need to dissolve the organisation outweighed the psychological effect that losing corporate status could have on followers. The court rejected the church’s argument that dissolution violated the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. The order ends its legal status as a religious corporation; it does not prohibit individuals from continuing to hold or practise their beliefs.
The group, formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, had appealed a Tokyo High Court decision issued in March. That court estimated victims’ losses from donation practices between March 1973 and June 2016 at about ¥7.4 billion. The dissolution process initiated liquidation of the corporation and created a route for compensating victims.
The Supreme Court pointed to broader illegitimate conduct between 1973 and 2022 that had inflicted extremely large property losses on many people. It focused on aggressive efforts to obtain substantial donations by pressing followers to meet unrealistic targets and found that the organisation had not implemented effective measures to stop the practice.
The ruling marked the first time a Japanese religious corporation was ordered dissolved for violations of the Civil Code. The Unification Church became the third religious organisation to receive a dissolution order under Japanese law. Earlier cases included Aum Shinrikyo, the group responsible for the deadly 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway.
Scrutiny of the church increased sharply after former prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated during an election speech in 2022. The gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, said he targeted Abe because of the former leader’s perceived family links to the church and the financial hardship that the organisation allegedly caused his own family. A court sentenced Yamagami to life imprisonment in January 2026; he appealed.
The killing also brought attention to relationships between church members and politicians in Japan’s governing party. Those political links formed part of the public context, while the dissolution judgment itself rested on the organisation’s conduct and the harm attributed to its fundraising practices.
By affirming the High Court, the Supreme Court removed the church’s remaining judicial challenge to the liquidation order described in the supplied evidence. The decision balanced freedom of religion against protection from repeated financial abuse and concluded that corporate dissolution was proportionate. Compensation and asset liquidation would proceed separately from the criminal case over Abe’s death.
