The suppression by police of protests during last month's visit by a Chinese official topped this year's top 10 human rights violations, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR) said yesterday, urging the government to stop sabotaging the nation's hard won democracy by promptly amending the Assembly and Parade Law (集會遊行法).
“President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he wants to export Taiwan's democracy to China. Instead, the government has imported the Chinese government's oppressive tactics into Taiwan,” TAHR deputy chairperson Lin Chia-fan (林佳範) said, slamming Ma for lacking credibility.
Official figures showed that more than 100 protesters and police officers were injured in clashes last month during several demonstrations against the visit by Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林).
During Chen's five-day visit, there were reports of unwarranted police searches, police ripping Republic of China flags from people's hands, apprehending people for waving the flags and a record store being shut down for playing a pro-Taiwan song.
While the pan-green camp and human rights groups, including Freedom House and Amnesty International, panned the government for denying the public freedom of expression, the administration insisted it had done nothing wrong, dubbing the demonstrators “lawless mobs and vigilantes.”
Foreign academics, including former American Institute in Taiwan director Nat Bellocchi and Ma's Harvard professor Jerome Cohen, have called on Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) to establish a fair and impartial judicial system as a number of former Democratic Progressive Party leaders, including former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), have been detained on suspicion of corruption.
Judicial Reform Foundation executive director Lin Feng-cheng (林峰正) said the mistreatment of these detainees exemplified government abuse of human rights.
Lin said that in Taiwan, the accused do not enjoy full client and lawyer confidentiality because their conversations while in detention are recorded.
No defendant would feel comfortable disclosing all the details to his counsel for fear of incriminating himself in court, Lin said.
Other rights violations on the list include the coerced relocation of two Aboriginal tribes from their homeland to make room for public infrastructure construction projects, the forced closure of the Losheng Sanatorium to accommodate the expansion of an MRT line and the widening of the legal parameters for law enforcement officials to collect DNA samples from suspects.
A prompt amendment to the assembly law is the only answer to Ma's plummeting approval ratings, Lin Chia-fan said.
“Martial law has been lifted for more than 20 years. The Assembly and Parade Law has also been denounced as unconstitutional. Even Ma once vowed to give the streets back to the people, but the reality is the government still asserts power over protesters,” he said.
In a true democracy, he said, individuals are guaranteed freedom of assembly and should not have to seek police permission to stage a public protest.
He also criticized the amendment proposed by the Cabinet after a month-long sit-in protest by students demanding changes to the law, saying it was a “laughingstock” because the draft only varied in word, but not in content.
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