You would think that Taiwan had become the murder capital of the world overnight if you were to believe the press in this country.
Driven by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) and Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫), and encouraged by the Judicial Yuan, the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment has been condemned without trial, case summarily dismissed and the death sentence imposed. This is an utterly unacceptable state of affairs.
The current environment fostered by our government, press-generated hysteria and a sense of moral panic amongst the public as a whole is quite regrettable. As a result, Taiwan has become mired in a conservative mindset preoccupied with traditional Confucian values, prey to callousness and indifference to suffering. Taiwan risks turning into a nation of irrational, clamoring, barbaric people with no regard for human rights.
Over the last couple of months death penatly abolition advocates have been subjected to slander after slander which, at times, has amounted to little more than irrational demonization.
Most of this has come from uninformed, anti-intellectual quarters quite ignorant of the direction the rest of the civilized world is moving in. Do they believe EU countries such as the UK, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, along with all the other countries in the world that have abolished the death penalty, are simply pretending to care about human rights? Is there any veracity at all to their claims that these countires would rather protect criminals than deal with the feelings of victims families?
Must we really join the ranks of the other 18 countries — including China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Yemen — that vigorously practice capital punishment?
It is wrong for the state to take the lives of people, just as it is wrong for individuals to do so. To make such an assertion in no way implies that murderers are innocent or that victims families should not be helped.
Ma, Tseng and Huang have consistently said that they see the abolition of the death penalty as a goal and have even voiced their support for such a move. But can they be taken at their word?
They appear all too willing to use capital punishment for political gain and that makes me doubt whether their support is genuine or conditional on public opinion polls. Up until this point, I have heard only arguments for why the death penalty should be retained and precious little about why they personally think it should be abolished.
Tseng has even asserted that it took European countries hundreds of years to do away with the death penalty, failing to make clear precisely from which date we plan to start counting. Is he suggesting that we should wait a century or two before we do so?
It is sometimes hard to beleive that it has been more than 20 years since the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ended martial law and introduced democracy in Taiwan. Both Ma and Tseng have said they favor abolition — do you believe them? Because I don’t, not one bit. They talk, but do nothing about it.
The government maintains that it is executing criminals in accordance with the law of the land, refusing to aknowledge that they are actually following two laws, now defunct, that were promulgated during the martial law period. It’s almost as if democracy never happened.
Chiu Hei-yuan is a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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