The Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (
"This social movement is not just about [speaking for the] wrongful convicted, but about the value of life," said Wu Chi-kwang (
Murder by Numbers
"Murder by Numbers," the name of the film festival, starts Friday at Taipei's President Cinema and runs through Dec. 15. The festival consists of 10 films which are of Taiwanese and foreign productions, all related to the topic of capital punishment.
The featured Taiwanese documentary film is called Going Home (
"When this film was played at a youth correction center a few years, it touched the hearts of a young people there. Years later, this boy approached me and told me how much the film had touched his heart, and it was the reason why he later became a counselor at the correction center," said Wu Hsiu-ching (
Tsai Pi-yu (蔡碧玉), the director of the Ministry of the Justice's Prosecutorial Affairs Department, said the plan to abolish the death penalty had long been on the ministry's agenda.
In a press conference in 2001, Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (
"The most important thing about the policy to abolish the death penalty is communicating with the public, which is concerned about public safety [once the penalty has been lifted]," Tsai said.
James Seymour, a senior researcher at Columbia University's East Asian Institute, supports the abolition of the death penalty as he valued the sacredness of life.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift