The Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) held a concert on the Double Ten holiday yesterday to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty, intended to raise public support for its campaign against capital punishment.
Individual singers and rock bands began performances at around 3:30pm in a small performance hall in Kaohsiung City.
Behind the bands, a message read: The death penalty must be abolished in Taiwan.
“Abolishing the death penalty is actually a global trend,” TAEDP executive director Lin Hsin-yi (林欣怡) told the Taipei Times in a phone interview.
During the General Assembly meeting last year, the UN decided to take a more active role in ending executions by adopting a “moratorium on the use of the death penalty.”
“We’ve seen too many cases around the world in which people are found innocent only after they were executed — There is unfortunately no chance of reversing the sentence for them,” Lin said.
Asia is considered the most “death penalty-active” continent, with the death penalty still in place in 14 countries.
However, Lin said she believed Taiwan could take a leading role in ending capital punishment in Asia.
“There has been no execution at all in Taiwan for nearly three years, and there are already debates on the topic,” she said. “We think there’s a hope, especially because Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng [王清峰] has openly spoken against the death penalty and President Ma Ying-jeou [馬英九] hinted so as well during the [presidential] campaign.”
Upon her inauguration, Wang said she was in favor of abolishing the death penalty.
Ma promised during his presidential campaign that he would govern the country following ideas outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
“Although Ma did not say it clearly, ending the death penalty is one of the ideas outlined in these documents,” Lin said.
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
Taiwan’s passport ranked 34th in the world, with access to 141 visa-free destinations, according to the latest update to the Henley Passport Index released today. The index put together by Henley & Partners ranks 199 passports globally based on the number of destinations holders can access without a visa out of 227, and is updated monthly. The 141 visa-free destinations for Taiwanese passport holders are a slight decrease from last year, when holders had access to 145 destinations. Botswana and Columbia are among the countries that have recently ended visa-free status for Taiwanese after “bowing to pressure from the Chinese government,” the Ministry
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