important value of freedom of expression is the monitoring and criticizing of the State, which monopolizes force, and of public servants, who run the State. In this regard, if public servants, who are the object of such monitoring and criticism, impose and enforce criminal penalties for stating true facts, healthy monitoring and criticism may be inevitably chilled. The abolishment of the crime of truthful defamation is a global trend reflecting repentance of past history in which it was utilized as a means to constrain civic monitoring of those in power, and reflecting consideration of a chilling effect on civic monitoring and criticism of public figures and matters. To justify criminal punishment for the expressive activity of publicly alleging facts, such activity must be “wrongful behavior” that results in an “unjust outcome.” However, it is difficult to recognize such activity as wrongful behavior, because stating true facts, as opposed to false ones, is generally not likely to be considered a negative act under the order of law. Additionally, criminal punishment for stating true facts intends to protect the reputation of a person that is established based on concealment of truth and, as such, merely amounts to a vain one earned among people having no knowledge of that truth. It is also difficult to recognize the expressive activity of stating true facts as resulting in an unjust outcome, because such activity damages a vain reputation that is false or exaggerated and should probably be changed by truth. Criminally punishing such activity in order to protect the vain reputation is hardly constitutionally justifiable. 3. Even if there is a need to protect personal reputation, which could be impaired by the expressive activity of publicly alleging facts, there are, in reality, less restrictive alternatives to criminal sanctions. In principle, it is most desirable to guarantee an opportunity to respond to an expressive activity with another expressive activity. Nowadays, the mediums of expression are becoming diverse and the distribution of data through information and communications networks is - 17 -