The Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty yesterday accused the government of having an ambiguous stance on the issue of death penalty and urged it stop executions immediately.
Holding up signs stating their names and the words “I demand an end to executions,” more than 50 people — social activists, academics, attorneys, environmentalists and artists — called on the government to cease executions right away.
In April, Taiwan ended a four-year de facto moratorium on capital punishment by executing four of the 44 inmates on death row.
On Friday, the Constitutional Court rejected a petition filed by the alliance for a constitutional interpretation on the legality of the death penalty, saying the execution of death row prisoners does not contravene the two UN covenants of which Taiwan is a signatory, referring to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that the legislature passed on March 31 last year.
The ruling clears the way for the execution of the 40 inmates who remain on death row.
“With the backing of the president, the premier, the minister of justice, the prosecutor general, the media and the Judicial Yuan, Taiwan has been filled with calls to kill,” said Chiu Hei-yuan (瞿海源), a sociology research fellow at Academia Sinica and convener of the alliance.
“These government officials have made Taiwan a conservative, indifferent, blood-thirsty and irrational country where people talk about morality but care nothing about human rights,” he said. “The president claims that abolishing capital punishment is the government’s ultimate goal, but it cannot wait to execute people. He has never explained how capital punishment would be abolished.”
Commenting on Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu’s (曾勇夫) statement that it took European countries hundreds of years to abolish the death penalty, Chiu said: “I wonder which year did he start counting?”
Alliance executive director Lin Hsin-yi (林欣怡) said that only China, North Korea, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Taiwan have executed prisoners in Asia this year.
“But we are a signatory of the ... [UN covenants], do we want to form an ‘Asian alliance for the death penalty’ with those non-signatory countries?” he asked.
Attorney Wellington Koo (顧立雄) called on President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to make clear his stance on the issue and come up with a concrete timetable for abolishing the death penalty.
“I hope that the president would follow the example of the late French president Francois Mitterrand, who, despite the opposition of the majority in his country at the time, openly supported abolishing capital punishment during his presidential campaign and kept his promise after he was elected,” Koo said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
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