An Amnesty International report released on Tuesday listed Taiwan as one of the 59 countries that still have the death penalty and anti-capital punishment activists yesterday urged the government to follow the global trend and abolish the practice.
The report said that more than 2,300 people were executed in 25 countries worldwide, while almost 9,000 others were sentenced to death last year.
“Overall, 138 countries around the world have abolished the death penalty — 92 that have completed abandoned it, 10 that abolished capital punishment during peacetime and 36 that have had no executions during the past 10 years,” Amnesty International Taiwan director Wang Hsing-chung (王興中) said. “Even among the 59 countries that still use the death penalty, only 25 of them had executions in 2008.”
“The figures show that ending the death penalty is a global trend,” Wang said.
Lin Hsin-yi (林欣怡), director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty, urged the government to follow suit.
“The government says it’s not the right time to abolish the death penalty, because most people still support it,” Lin said. “But if we look at examples in other countries, opinion is against abolishing the death penalty, but other governments still abolished it.”
Lin said it often takes a decisive political leader, better crime prevention policies and good substitutes to the death penalty to win popular support for the policy. She said popular support for abolishing the death penalty would increase in the long run.
Lin said that Taiwan has not had an execution since December 2005 and that there has been growing debate on abolishing capital punishment.
“It’s really a good sign that we’re getting close to [abolishing the death penalty] and I hope we can soon complete the last mile,” she said.
She also urged the public to pay more attention to the physical and psychological condition of the 32 people currently on death row.
The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts yesterday apologized for forbidding children from copying paintings by freehand drawing, saying it welcomes visitors to make sketches of paintings on drawing tablets or sketchpads. The museum issued the remark after a museumgoer nicknamed “Mickeyelk Gesner” on Thursday posted on Facebook that her son had been sketching a painting by Pablo Picasso on a tablet computer at the exhibition “Capturing the Moment” on Wednesday when a museum worker told him to stop drawing. “The staff told us, ‘Only taking photos is allowed. No copying. This is a rule,’” she quoted the worker as saying. Physician Lee Chia-yan
ACCESS DENIAL: Beijing would likely take formation in the Philippine Sea, outside Taipei’s missile range, while its forces on the east would be a deterrent to foreign aid China is increasingly likely to employ a strategy of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) around Taiwan, which would use three carrier groups, a report from the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. When China’s third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, is completed next year, China would have three carriers, which would likely be used to surround Taiwan and implement an A2/AD strategy, it said, adding that efforts to strengthen China’s two other carriers — the Liaoning and the Shandong — appear to corroborate this. In the quarterly report, the council cited declassified documents from the Ministry of National Defense that categorized China’s carriers as
China’s travel booking platform ctrip.com has removed the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Shanghai from its listings after the chain’s Paris venue banned the Chinese national flag during the 2024 Summer Olympics, sparking an Internet furor. The story — which had garnered 110 million views on Sina Weibo — had since been removed from the platform’s list of most popular posts. On Monday, a Chinese influencer known as Instructor Zhang (張教官) accused the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Paris of refusing his request for the Chinese flag to be displayed at the venue in a video uploaded to TikTok. A person purported to be a
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 5:06pm yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The earthquake occurred offshore, 38.3km south-southeast of Yilan County Hall, at a depth of 9km, CWA data showed. The quake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, was highest in parts of Yilan County, where it measured a “weak 5” on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale. The temblor recorded an intensity of 4 in parts of Hualien, Taoyuan and New Taipei, and 3 in parts of Taichung, Nantou, Taipei, Hsinchu and Miaoli, CWA data showed. There were no immediate reports of damage