Amnesty International last month published a report about torture and launched a campaign to stop the trade in weapons used for torture, but human rights activists and lawyers say that torture by police remains rife in Taiwan.
The whole culture of the criminal justice system needs to change, they say.
They say that ceasing the trade may reduce torture, but claim it is impossible to fully stop the practice.
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Brian Kennedy, a US attorney in Taiwan who helped Amnesty International collect information about the torture weapons trade on the island, agrees with that view.
"It is the culture that matters," Kennedy said.
Su Yue-chen (
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Physical torture
"Sure they use stun guns to commit torture. My client in the famous Hsichih Trio was tortured by having a needle inserted into his urethra before being given electric shocks. But it is also common for the police to torture suspects by forcing them to drink urine, water mixed with soap or red pepper or forcing the suspects to sit on ice in front of a fan to create an unbearable chill," Su said.
Lee Mau-sheng (
Taiwan is a good example of how torture is "encouraged" by flaws in, as well as the culture within, the criminal justice system, rather than the promotion of special tools.
But there is no statistical evidence on the prevalence of torture. "Local human rights groups don't have the resources to conduct a statistical analysis or a review of police torture cases," Kennedy said.
A retired police officer who requested anonymity said the prevalence of torture has decreased considerably. "Currently only those involved in major and high-profile crimes as well as rape, theft and drug abuse are tortured. Saying that torture is rife in Taiwan simply isn't true and will spoil our international reputation," he said.
But human rights activists said torture is still widely practiced by police.
In a survey conducted by the Chinese Association for Human Rights (
Responding to the police officer's remark, Joseph Lin (林永頌), an attorney with the Judicial Reform Foundation, said a situation in which suspects in "only major and high-profile" criminal cases are tortured deserves particular concern.
"Torture in these cases leads to confessions that can cause an innocent person to be sentenced to death," he said.
Kenneth Chiu (邱晃泉), a lawyer and another member of the president's human rights advisory group, remembered having received "convincing complaints" from at least six prisoners about being tortured within the past five years. "I believe there are still many torture cases and their numbers have been underestimated," he said.
Lin further ridiculed the proposition that the situation had improved.
"If you compare it to the situation 50 years ago, of course you can say it has improved a lot," he said.
Police evaluation structure blamed
Activists and legal experts blamed police performance evaluation methods for police torture. "The more criminal cases they break, the more the credits and the larger the bonuses they earn," Lee said.
Lee, who has frequent contact with the police, described how the police approach suspects. He said that because each police station is responsible for a particular area, whenever a crime is reported, the police station concerned only focuses on suspects within its own jurisdiction. "But this is illogical as transportation allows the criminal to travel," said Lee.
He said the police also tend to look for suspects only on the basis of available data relating to ex-convicts.
"What can they do if they want to perform better without logical methods to find criminals? Of course they have to rely on torturing incorrectly identified `suspects' for confessions," he said.
Insufficient training in investigative work is another factor behind the police's recourse to torture.
The police earn credit for having a case go to trial, even if the ultimate verdict is not guilty.
Kennedy said that "the poor quality of investigations and police ineptitude at collecting forensic evidence" convinces him that the police must rely on torture to obtain confessions in order to claim that they are triumphing over crime.
Lee said that there is currently nobody in Taiwan qualified to analyze scientific evidence for the purpose of reconstructing a crime scene apart from Wun Jin-hui (
"The top administrators do not necessarily understand the importance of such training as they were not trained for that in college," said Lin.
He said that lack of respect for human rights was also responsible for police use of torture. "The lowest-ranked police officer receives only four months training before starting to enforce the law. How much could he understand about human rights?" he asked.
Political pressure
Many lawyers and human rights activists suggest that pressure to crack criminal cases also causes the police to resort to torture.
Chiu said that the government is always under political pressure to push the police immediately solve serious criminal cases.
"But most people neglect one thing -- torture to obtain confessions not only ignores the human rights of the suspect, but it might also allow the real criminal, who represents a threat to society, to go free," Lin remarked.
Public indifference
Human rights activists said the public does not really care about the issue because most think that torture only happens to the underprivileged and marginalized.
Taiwan does not yet have a system of legal aid, whereby, among other things, attorneys are funded by the government to serve poor suspects.
Chiu and Lee said the media are also responsible for encouraging the police to carry out torture to obtain confessions.
"Reporters embrace every show the police put on to show how they have cracked a criminal case because there is not enough news on this small island," Lee said.
Police frequently force suspects who have confessed to reenact their crimes in front of the victim's family and the media. Lin said sometimes intimidated suspects are forced to stage what the police tell them to in order to avoid further torture, but their actions during the reenactment often later become evidence used against them if the defendant alleges torture.
Judicial system encourages torture
Most activists and lawyers, however, say that more than anything else it is the judiciary's acceptance of confessions that encourages the police to torture suspects.
"It's the pollution of the upper reaches [judges] that makes the downstream [police officers] dirty," commented Peter Huang (
Legal professionals call confessions the "queen of evidence." In Taiwan, when a confession matches the known details of the crime, other evidence becomes of minor importance. Confessions of different suspects involved in the same case serve to corroborate one another.
Critics say that Taiwanese judges always have piles of cases awaiting verdicts.
"They don't have time to review cases. So even if the evidence is insufficient, as long as confessions are obtained, the judges will simply convict the suspect for convenience's sake," both Lee and Su said.
They complained that the attitude of the judiciary encourages the police to file confessions gained through torture, which are more easily acquired, than through the use of scientific evidence.
Compounding the problem, prosecutors are equally disinterested in torture cases, although they are obliged to conduct investigations into torture once an allegation is made.
"Prosecutors and police are on the same side," said Lin.
"Our students are not trained to conduct investigations. Once they become prosecutors, they rely on the police for investigations. For that reason, they cannot be against the police," Lee said.
Critics say the mentality and legal training of judicial professionals is also a huge problem. "My students told me they chose a career in law for the money," Lee said.
"Taiwanese society lacks sufficient education regarding respect for human rights," Lin said.
Huang and Chiu said Taiwan's isolation from the international community and its decades under martial law had caused it to lag behind in the promotion of human rights.
Lawyers agree that cases of the police being prosecuted for torturing suspects is extremely rare. Su said judges, who have only one and a half years of training before sitting on the bench, are woefully ill-equipped for finding evidence of torture.
Su accused the police of failing to follow the law by videotaping and recording the questioning of suspects. Lin and Su have encountered editing and muffling of tapes by the police to remove evidence of torture.
Police don't care about videotaping the process because they aren't responsible for providing evidence to prove that they have not tortured suspects, they said.
The suspect who makes an allegation of torture is required to provide evidence of that torture, often difficult when the torture has been conducted in a closed room in the presence of no one other than police officers.
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