Seeking redress for unjust military tribunal rulings and other military abuses should not be subject to ordinary statutes of limitations, New Power Party (NPP) legislators said yesterday as several alleged victims’ family members complained of being denied access to evidence.
“The problem is that these are not ordinary criminal cases, but we currently impose ordinary time limits for taking care of them and providing redress,” NPP Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐) said at a hearing on new proposed legislation to establish an independent investigative body to examine past cases of military abuse.
“Many incidents reflect a different power relationship from ordinary criminal cases,” Lim said. “The military has weapons, lots of people and is closed to outsiders, so it’s different from a roadside crime — as soon as a problem occurs, it is possible for them to ‘take care’ of a lot of the evidence.”
Association for the Promotion of Human Rights in the Military director Chen Pi-e (陳碧娥) said that family members of the victims in abuse are often left with nowhere to turn because military officials habitually cover for one another and collude on testimony, while all evidence is typically in military hands.
“When my son had just died, my mind was completely blank, but after I slowly started to wake up and wanted to go to the base, they said I had to provide new evidence [to appeal the military’s suicide ruling]. I live in Taoyuan, but everything happened in Hualien. How I am I supposed to get evidence?” said Lee Cheng-ta (李正大), the father of Lee Ming-hsing (李明興), an army private who the military ruled had committed suicide in 2006 after being pulled out of the hospital by his superior officers.
The Hualien District Prosecutors’ office reopened the case after the Executive Yuan’s former Military Injustice Petition Committee found evidence of criminal error leading to death, but the Ministry of Defense refused to provide compensation on grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.
The committee was established in 2013 to review petitions on past military abuses in the wake of mass protests over the death of army corporal Hung Chung-chiu (洪仲丘), but referred only 11 cases to the judiciary for further review before disbanding a year later, with critics pointing to its lack of investigative powers.
Hung, brother of NPP Legislator Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸), allegedly died from abuse while performing his compulsory military service.
Hung Tzu-yung yesterday said that addressing past military abuses was one of the “links” in achieving “transitional justice.”
Many of the political dissidents who were locked away during the White Terror period of political oppression were tried by military tribunals.
“In the past, superior officers and the judges in military tribunals were not independent of each other, so military trials were not compatible with fair judgment procedure,” Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said, adding that amendments to the National Security Act (國家安全法) passed following the lifting of martial law prevented previous military tribunal rulings being reopened.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching