"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," said the late US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Traditionally, New Year's is a time to look back over the past year and look forward to the coming year; to take stock of where we stand. The execution of eight death row inmates in one day a couple of months ago raises the issue of what is the state of human rights and civil liberties here in Taiwan.
The Taiwanese public has become quite blase towards the issue of human rights. The public consensus is that the "bad old days" of martial law and all that it brought are over. The public seems to think that Taiwan has got past the stage where there were serious and widespread human rights abuses; death squads, torture, kangaroo court trials, the Taiwan Garrison Command and all of that.
This public idea certainly has been fostered by the government. President Lee Teng-hui calls himself "Mr Democracy" and his party, the KMT, self-congratulates itself on the "new and progressive" Taiwan.
Prominent government officials of all parties talk of the strides forward which have been made in the area of human rights and civil liberties. The media joins in the chorus and the public accepts it.
It is certainly true that the human rights situation here in Taiwan has improved markedly over the past 10 to 15 years. There are no more prisoners of conscience, no more extra-judicial killings, the civil liberties of freedom of the press and freedom of assemblage are, by and large, respected. These are all positive developments.
However, to say the situation has improved greatly says more about where Taiwan was 15 years ago than it does about where the nation is today. It is easy to say things have improved when the relatively recent past history includes such things as the 2-28 massacres, the White Terror and literally hundreds of prisoners of conscience.
Undue complacency, undue self-congratulation, is not warranted regarding Taiwan's human rights or civil liberties situation. The public has accepted three ideas that are in fact completely false and which serve to fundamentally weaken the human rights situation here.
First is the idea that human rights progress is historically a "one way street." The idea that Taiwan could not return to the terrors of the past is wrong. The fact that the 2-28 massacres and the White Terror lie in the past does not preclude them from occurring again.
There is a common proverb that says history repeats itself. Any historian of human rights could cite many examples of nations that made considerable progress in human rights turning back, often with frightening quickness, into periods of oppression and terror.
This is particularly true in nations where the concept of human rights and civil liberties is not deeply rooted; which is exactly the situation we have here in Taiwan.
Human rights education is practically nonexistent; the educational system is not geared to instilling in Taiwanese children a sense of their individual dignity and rights. The scant attention which is paid to human rights in the school program always is set against a backdrop of "obey your government, fulfill your responsibilities." This essentially undermines the basic concept of human rights, which is that each individual has certain inalienable rights regardless of what the government says or does.
Human rights awareness, what might be termed a "human rights mentality," has very shallow roots here in Taiwan. That fact makes it far easier to turn back the clock. Human rights progress is not a one way street. The public needs to understand this fact.
Second is the idea that there are no more human rights violations occurring here in Taiwan. That too, is a completely false idea. Most of the nations of the world consider the death penalty the gravest human rights violation of all. Most nations of the world have renounced the use of the death penalty. Taiwan executed 10 people in a one-week period, eight of them in one day. The mere presence of the death penalty in Taiwan is a grave human rights abuse.
Police torture also remains a serious and endemic problem. Human rights abuses, including deaths, continue in the military. Conscientious objectors to military service are imprisoned. The fundamental rights of women, although protected by law, are routinely ignored in practice. To say that Taiwan has no more human rights abuses ignores the reality of the situation.
Third is the idea that there are two kinds of people: "good people and bad people." This idea is quite common throughout the world, even in countries that have a long history of human rights and civil liberties such as the US. How this thinking works is thus: when a member of the public hears of a suspect being tortured by the police, the member of the public thinks "well the suspect is a bad person, he deserved it; since I am a good person the police would never torture me".
The reality the public needs to understand is that the world is not, in fact, divided up into "good people and bad people."
The late US President John F. Kennedy said it best: "The rights of all men are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened." If the human rights of all people are not respected, then in reality no one has human rights.
In reality, the state of human rights and civil liberties here in Taiwan is not good. What civil liberties we have rest on very weak foundations. Serious human rights abuses occur on a daily basis here and the public has a very apathetic attitude towards that fact. Taiwan has come a long way, but it still has far to go.
Brian Kennedy is a member of the boards of Amnesty International Taiwan and the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
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