A majority of the public feel that the government has failed to protect their basic human right to health and ensure fairness in the judiciary this year, a survey released yesterday by the Shih Hsin University Institute of Knowledge Economy Development indicated.
The survey, now in its seventh year, asked respondents to grade the government’s efforts to promote freedom and human rights on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 denoting abysmal,” 3 representing “fair” and 5 indicating “excellent.”
The survey’s methodology is based on a system created by Freedom House, a US watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world, the institute said.
The government’s score on “human right to health,” listed under the government’s “overall performance” to protect human rights, dropped from last year’s 2.5 to 2.1 this year, while the approval rating in the “right to fair trials” category fell from 2.3 to 1.9.
The ratings are likely to have been negatively impacted by the Changhua District Court’s decision to acquit six former Ting Hsin International Group managers of all charges related to a tainted oil scandal, institute assistant researcher Yeh Feng-ku (葉峰谷) said.
With the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative elections around the corner, the government’s score on the “right to elections” category took a major fall from 3.1 last year to 2.7 this year.
When asked "whether they agree" that death penalty "should be abolished," 22.8 percent of respondents said they partially disagree, while 61.6 percent said they completely disagree with it.
The survey asked respondents how often they came into contact with news about human rights and democracy, and researchers cross-referenced the answers given for each item, discovering that the more a person was exposed to information, the less likely they were to rate the government’s performance highly.
Presidential Office Human Rights Advisory Committee member Chai Sung-lin (柴松林) said that while he would not say that the court had issued an unjust verdict in the Ting Hsin case, the ruling was a “far cry” from public expectations, and this gave rise to the government’s poor ratings in the survey.
The nation’s legislative and judicial systems should be reviewed, and the results would have been quite different if the “innocent until proven guilty” principle adopted by the nation’s judiciary was replaced by the principle of acting in good faith, Chai said.
The ratings are not necessarily a setback for the nation’s democracy, as they could indicate that information is more accessible and that the public now has a better understanding or cares more about the issue of human rights, attorney Yang Fang-wan (楊芳婉) said.
Regarding the Ting Hsin case, abstruse language allowed judges to interpret national laws “to their liking,” she said.
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