More than 400 human rights defenders from all over the world gathered in Taipei from Monday to yesterday to discuss how to confront challenges to the universality of human rights. It was the first time in its nearly 100-year history that the Congress of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) was held in Asia.
The issue was front and center on the agenda as death row exoneree Hsu Tzu-chiang (徐自強) gave his powerful testimony during Monday morning’s opening ceremony — application of the death penalty is clearly inconsistent with international human rights standards.
I sat next to President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) as Hsu told us of how he was sentenced to death in 1996 and incarcerated for 16 years before he was released in 2012.
Hsu also told the story of 60-year-old Chiou Ho-shun (邱和順), who was sentenced to death in 1989 for murder, following an extremely flawed and unfair trial. Chiou has been behind bars for 31 years, the last eight of which have been on death row.
That afternoon, I headed an FIDH international delegation that visited the Taipei Detention Center, where Chiou is incarcerated. Our delegation also saw the execution site, and held a productive meeting with prison authorities and officials from the Agency of Corrections.
I cannot hide that spending time at the execution site was among the darkest and most important moments of my human rights work.
Chiou, along with 22 other death row inmates at the detention center, could be executed at any time. The detention center told us that death row inmates receive 30 minutes’ notice before being taken to the facility’s execution site. In many cases, family members are only informed after the execution, which is carried out by being shot to death with a handgun.
Hearing about Chiou’s judicial odyssey and the visit to the detention center reaffirmed my conviction that the death penalty is a cruel and barbaric punishment that violates every aspect of human dignity. I find it difficult to reconcile that a modern and vibrant democracy like Taiwan retains such an outdated and inhumane practice.
At the very least, Tsai should establish an immediate moratorium on all executions as a key step toward the complete abolition of capital punishment. Chiou and all other death row inmates in Taiwan should no longer live in fear of a looming execution.
When it comes to human rights, Taiwan has shown that it can be a pioneer. Earlier this year, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. The nation now has an opportunity to demonstrate that it can be a regional human rights leader by abolishing capital punishment.
It is true that important changes often provoke feelings of insecurity among societies. Yet, Taiwanese have nothing to fear from the abolition of the death penalty. When then-French president Francois Mitterrand abolished the death penalty in 1981, public opinion was not in favor of the move. Today in France, no one is in favor of reintroducing the death penalty, apart from followers of the far-right.
Generally, in countries that have abolished the death penalty, public opinion has never demanded a reintroduction of capital punishment, because citizens realize that its abolition changes nothing in their daily lives. Without the death penalty, Taiwan will only be a more just and rights-respecting country.
I sincerely hope that holding the FIDH congress in Taiwan has created the momentum needed to create a society that is more respectful of human dignity.
It is all about dignity. How can you teach that killing is wrong by killing?
Dimitris Christopoulos is the president of the International Federation for Human Rights.
Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not a “happy camper” these days regarding Taiwan? Taiwanese have not become more “CCP friendly” in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) use of spies and graft by the United Front Work Department, intimidation conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Armed Police/Coast Guard, and endless subversive political warfare measures, including cyber-attacks, economic coercion, and diplomatic isolation. The percentage of Taiwanese that prefer the status quo or prefer moving towards independence continues to rise — 76 percent as of December last year. According to National Chengchi University (NCCU) polling, the Taiwanese
US President Donald Trump is systematically dismantling the network of multilateral institutions, organizations and agreements that have helped prevent a third world war for more than 70 years. Yet many governments are twisting themselves into knots trying to downplay his actions, insisting that things are not as they seem and that even if they are, confronting the menace in the White House simply is not an option. Disagreement must be carefully disguised to avoid provoking his wrath. For the British political establishment, the convenient excuse is the need to preserve the UK’s “special relationship” with the US. Following their White House
It would be absurd to claim to see a silver lining behind every US President Donald Trump cloud. Those clouds are too many, too dark and too dangerous. All the same, viewed from a domestic political perspective, there is a clear emerging UK upside to Trump’s efforts at crashing the post-Cold War order. It might even get a boost from Thursday’s Washington visit by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In July last year, when Starmer became prime minister, the Labour Party was rigidly on the defensive about Europe. Brexit was seen as an electorally unstable issue for a party whose priority
After the coup in Burma in 2021, the country’s decades-long armed conflict escalated into a full-scale war. On one side was the Burmese army; large, well-equipped, and funded by China, supported with weapons, including airplanes and helicopters from China and Russia. On the other side were the pro-democracy forces, composed of countless small ethnic resistance armies. The military junta cut off electricity, phone and cell service, and the Internet in most of the country, leaving resistance forces isolated from the outside world and making it difficult for the various armies to coordinate with one another. Despite being severely outnumbered and
RSS