The legislature’s Education and Culture Committee yesterday failed to pass a preliminary review of a draft act on the preservation of sites of injustice, as lawmakers could not agree on how to properly address historical sites and historical periods that the draft act would cover.
The National Human Rights Museum’s archive for historical sites of injustice defines “sites of injustice” as those where rulers during the authoritarian era — between Aug. 15, 1945 and Nov. 6, 1992 — contravened human rights by crushing protesters, committing extrajudicial executions, or abusing police or judicial systems to arrest, detain, rape, interrogate, judge, imprison, execute or bury people.
While the Executive Yuan’s version of the draft act adopts the same definition and limits the purview of the bill to sites where injustices were committed between those dates, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Sra Kacaw and Non-Party Solidarity Union Legislator May Chin (高金素梅) — both representatives of indigenous constituents — proposed that the rulers of the Japanese colonial era between 1895 and 1945, and the Qing Dynasty be included as well.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
As lawmakers at the committee failed to reach a consensus on most of the articles, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Fan Yun (范雲), who convened the meeting, ruled to review the draft another time.
Aside from the periods that should be covered in the act, lawmakers also shared different thoughts about whether the sites should be called “sites of injustice” or “human rights historical sites.”
DPP Legislator Lin I-chin (林宜瑾) said that the act should specifically address violence committed by the authoritarian regime against individuals, which should be treated as a separate matter from that committed by colonial regimes.
“Each era has its unique historical background and there should be different remedies for violence in different eras. Including all human rights violations, regardless of the eras in which they happened, would undermine the progress that has already been made in transitional justice. Neither would it help us to deliver a proper review of issues related to state violence,” Lin said.
Sra Kacaw said that indigenous people endured injustices committed by every ruler of Taiwan, and therefore, the act should address all these injustices and all the historical sites related to them.
Groups advocating for transitional justice also criticized the KMT’s version of the act, saying that it was meant to confuse the public about its perception of the authoritarian regime and diminish the brutality of state violence.
“By proposing to expand the time periods covered by the act, is the KMT being serious about addressing issues of transitional justice by tackling its history of ruling through an authoritarian regime? Are they using ‘historical justice’ to confuse the public?” Taiwan Youth Association of Transitional Justice and Kiong-Seng secretary-general Pan Mei (潘美) said.
Pan also urged the legislature to pass the draft act to preserve the sites of injustice.
The National Human Rights Museum has listed 42 confirmed sites of injustice and 64 potential sites of injustice, but the landscape of many of the sites has changed, and the few that remain need urgent repairs, they said.
Without the act, they would not be preserved and might soon be demolished, they added.
A magnitude 4.9 earthquake struck off Tainan at 11:47am today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The hypocenter was 32.3km northeast of Tainan City Hall at a depth of 7.3km, CWA data showed. The intensity of the quake, which gauges the actual effect of a seismic event, measured 4 in Tainan and Chiayi County on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale, the data showed. The quake had an intensity of 3 in Chiayi City and County, and Yunlin County, while it was measured as 2 in Kaohsiung, Nantou County, Changhua County, Taitung County and offshore Penghu County, the data showed. There were no immediate reports of
Weather conditions across Taiwan are expected to remain stable today, but cloudy to rainy skies are expected from tomorrow onward due to increasing moisture in the atmosphere, according to the Central Weather Administration (CWA). Daytime highs today are expected to hit 25-27°C in western Taiwan and 22-24°C in the eastern counties of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung, data on the CWA website indicated. After sunset, temperatures could drop to 16-17°C in most parts of Taiwan. For tomorrow, precipitation is likely in northern Taiwan as a cloud system moves in from China. Daytime temperatures are expected to hover around 25°C, the CWA said. Starting Monday, areas
Taiwan has recorded its first fatal case of Coxsackie B5 enterovirus in 10 years after a one-year-old boy from southern Taiwan died from complications early last month, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. CDC spokesman Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) told a news conference that the child initially developed a fever and respiratory symptoms before experiencing seizures and loss of consciousness. The boy was diagnosed with acute encephalitis and admitted to intensive care, but his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he passed away on the sixth day of illness, Lo said. This also marks Taiwan’s third enterovirus-related death this year and the first severe
A Taiwanese software developer has created a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model to help people use AI without exposing sensitive data, project head Huang Chung-hsiao (黃崇校) said yesterday. Huang, a 55-year-old coder leading a US-based team, said that concerns over data privacy and security in popular generative AIs such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek motivated him to develop a personal AI assistant named “Mei.” One of the biggest security flaws with cloud-based algorithms is that users are required to hand over personal information to access the service, giving developers the opportunity to mine user data, he said. For this reason, many government agencies and
RSS