The Transitional Justice Commission no doubt has been dealt a severe blow after the scandal last month in which former deputy chairman Chang Tien-chin (張天欽) allegedly proposed to manipulate public opinion against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) New Taipei City mayoral candidate Hou You-yi (侯友宜).
As a result, not only has the commission been left with no leadership following Chang’s resignation and chairman Huang Huang-hsiung’s (黃煌雄) departure on Oct. 6, it has brewed political confrontation, fomented distrust and caused people to question its credibility — a far cry from its solemn mission of moving the nation toward reconciliation.
Disappointment would be an understatement to describe the feelings of many who care deeply about democracy, particularly those affected by the White Terror era and their families, who had high expectations the commission would establish historical truth and redress miscarriages of justice.
Granted, the commission earlier this month exonerated 1,270 people who were convicted during the White Terror era, but more daunting tasks lie ahead for it to “regain the public’s trust,” in the words of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) this month.
However, the commission is reeling from the Chang incident.
Unnamed commission members last week said that plans to set up a psychotherapy center for people with psychological trauma caused by political repression during the White Terror era had been scrapped due to a lack of funding. Chang’s remarks made it difficult to obtain funding from the Executive Yuan, the sources said.
Meanwhile, the commission acknowledged that it had been unable to pay staff salaries for the first few months after it was established in May.
Last month, a commission source said that it was planning to create a transitional justice database to create historical profiles of political cases during the authoritarian era and identify those who violated human rights.
Such a database would be of significant importance, as it would help fill in details of many cases where those who were persecuted are known, but the perpetrators are not.
However, the situation looks bleak for an agency tasked with responsibilities such as removing remnants of the nation’s authoritarian past, restoring historical truth and facilitating social reconciliation.
While an inefficient and ineffective Transitional Justice Commission might be what some with links to the authoritarian period secretly hope for so the guilty cannot be identified and held accountable for their actions, paving the way for a one-party authoritarian system to make a comeback, the nation — having made it so far thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of democracy pioneers — must not allow a regression.
“Democracy will not take a backward step and neither will transitional justice,” Tsai promised this month.
Time and a strong sense of determination are vital so that transitional justice can be truly implemented.
Hopefully, Tsai’s administration can walk the walk by making sure the commission does not devolve into a paper tiger without claws, like the Control Yuan.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past