The issue of whether criminal suspects should wear masks in front of the media has once again become the subject of heated debate. The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) recently decided that all criminal suspects, with the exception of minors under the age of 18, may no longer wear masks. This reversal of the MOI's policy has prompted the news media to give extensive coverage to the views of human-rights activists. Some believe the decision is a retrograde step as far as human rights are concerned.
I disagree. The policy of the right to cover-up came into being because of Taiwan's peculiar media culture. The media's claim that it is closely related to the debate on human rights is not necessarily true.
First, do fugitive criminal suspects -- sex offenders and murder suspects for example -- need the protection provided by masks? Can their photographs be made public? Some will say that of course they need protection before the investigation and trial are over. But the problem is that over-protection is likely to make victims of more innocent people.
The Web sites of major police stations in the US often display the photographs of wanted suspects, in the hope that the public can help with the arrest.
I once served as an investigator for the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB). On the way back to Taiwan from abroad, a fraud suspect under my escort requested not to be photographed by the media. As I tried to shield and protect the suspect at the point of entry, the media reporters attacked me from all sides.
Indeed, clashes of this sort have been all too common. The most well-known example is the case of notorious murder suspect Chen Chin-hsing (
In other countries, we rarely see scenes of suspects appearing at police stations, because the media cannot enter that "forbidden area." That is to say, the US media are not allowed to enter police stations.
The media are not likely to pay much attention to minor cases except, perhaps, when there are no major cases going on. For major cases, the media will do whatever they can to get the shots they want. If they can't photograph the suspect in person, they will still find photographs from archives. Whether the suspects in major cases wear masks or not, therefore, would seem to make little difference.
It is evident that the source of the problem is the fierce competition in the media. The government, unable to change our media culture, came up with the policy of allowing suspects to wear masks.
A simple question to consider is why the question of "to mask or not to mask" is considered a human-rights issue in Taiwan, but not in many advanced countries such as the US? The people of the US, that champion of human rights, would perhaps be baffled as to how the question could be considered controversial. The source of the problem is the background of our society and culture. We have a peculiar media culture because of fierce competition. Few criminal cases under investigation can escape the media's magic eye. A media culture as competitive as ours is a rare thing. As reporters often camp out at police stations to get the latest news on criminal cases, frequent conflict between the needs to preserve the confidentiality of investigations on the one hand and freedom of information on the other is inevitable.
I think the MOI's decision was purely a matter of expediency, designed as a sop to both the media and the human-rights lobby. It is not just a human-rights issue.
Yang Yung-nane is a professor and director of the Department of Administrative Management at Central Police University.
Translated by Grace Shaw
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