Human rights education in many parts of Asia is still lacking and in need of substantive and qualitative change, academics and human rights activists from Asia said yesterday at a conference in Taipei.
Jefferson Plantilla, a lawyer and human rights educator based in Japan, said that many cases of human rights violations were reported throughout Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when rulers placed economic growth ahead of improving human rights education awareness and training.
Plantilla made the remarks at the three-day international conference titled “Propagation and Implementation of the Idea of Human Rights” organized by the Taipei Municipal University of Education.
Plantilla said that since 2000, human rights education centers have been established across the region, and as of November this year, 90 such centers were in place to help promote human rights education.
However, the lack of coordination among these centers still poses a big problem for citizens, he said.
Li Dan (李丹), an AIDS and human rights activist from China, said that he has felt deprived of human rights education from a very young age.
“If you are an optimist, you would say things are gradually changing in China, but the truth is that courses and teaching on human rights education remain very scant,” Li said.
He said there are only two universities in China that offer courses that teach the universal values of human rights, while the majority of schools are more inclined to brainwash students into believing that Chinese people do not need the kind of human rights education that is widely available to students in the West.
Tang Mei-ying (湯梅英), a professor with the Taipei Municipal University of Education, who has conducted several surveys into teachers’ attitudes on the promotion of human rights education in Taiwan, said that most local teachers are supportive of the teaching and promotion of human rights-related courses.
She said the responsibility for creating a positive environment for the promotion of human rights education in Taiwan is not just that of educators. The government and media should also be more actively involved.
“When it comes to human rights education in Taiwan, we need more action and fewer slogans,” she said, adding that “political influence should also be eliminated.”
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods