Visiting lawmakers said yesterday they regretted the Taiwanese government’s decision to carry out executions for the first time in more than four years.
The Ministry of Justice executed four inmates on Friday, leaving 40 others on death row. Until Friday’s executions, the ministry had not approved an execution since December 2005.
“It is revolting that four people have been put to death by a civilized, wealthy country. This is barbaric,” Australian Greens leader and Senator Bob Brown said on the sidelines of the Second Congress of the Asia Pacific Greens Network (APGN), being held in Taipei.
“It dehumanizes the governments that not only allow it to happen, but do not legislate against it,” he said.
Australia abolished the death penalty in the 1960s.
Brown said crime rates do not increase, and very often fall, after the death penalty is abolished.
He urged Taiwan to end the death penalty through legislation.
He also called on Taiwan to do better than the US, China and Iran, countries that carry out what he called “murder with a judicial warrant.”
“We are all better off when we end this barbaric practice,” Brown said.
“I am very upset on that, very sad,” said Gerald Hafner, a German member of the European Parliament.
“Whatever they have done, I think the death penalty is something we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t kill people for having killed others, for having done wrong … I was happy that Taiwan didn’t execute the death penalty ... for a period of time,” Hafner said.
Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲), the convener of Green Party Taiwan, which co-organized the congress, said that abolition of the death penalty is been one of the core values of the Global Green Network, a political alliance of Green Parties around the world.
“It was a shock to our international friends attending the congress because while they were promoting a resolution on the issue [at the event], the Taiwan government suddenly took such a big step backward,” he said.
The four executions prompted Green Party Taiwan to launch a petition at the event that urges the Taiwan government to not “continue to walk the wrong path.”
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