Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫) refused to commit to a request by victims’ families that the 40 detainees on death be executed simultaneously.
During a meeting with a group of victims’ families at his office on Friday, the minister offered his sympathies, but said he was determined to handle the convicts in accordance with the law.
“The law is meant to bring justice to the world and criminals should be punished according to law,” he said. “Although the Ministry of Justice has set the abolition of the death penalty as a goal, those who have already been sentenced to death should be executed, as required by the law.”
Although the meeting was behind closed doors, Hsu Wen-bin (許文彬), a national policy adviser to the president and a human rights lawyer, said afterwards that many families of the victims tearfully pleaded with Tseng to have all death row inmates executed simultaneously.
Tseng took office on March 22 to fill a post left by Wang Ching-feng (王清峰), who resigned amid a public outcry after refusing to sign execution orders for death row inmates.
Tseng has told the Legislative Yuan that he personally favors the abolishment of the death penalty, but that he would follow the law in dealing with death row inmates unless it is changed to end capital punishment.
Tseng made headlines when he approved the execution of four death row inmates on April 30 — the nation’s first executions since December 2005 — and drew condemnation from an EU foreign policy chief, who asked Taiwan to declare a moratorium on the death penalty and work to amend laws abolishing the practice.
Amnesty International and the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network on Thursday repeated their appeals to the Taiwanese government to restore an unofficial moratorium on executions to spare the lives of 40 death row inmates.
The two groups’ separate statements came after a decision on May 28 by the Council of Grand Justices of the Constitutional Court rejecting a petition by the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty on behalf of the prisoners.
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