Shedding light on the truth and reflecting on the past are crucial parts of achieving transitional justice, German Institute Taipei Director-General Martin Eberts said yesterday.
“It’s intolerable for the truth to be suppressed — a civilized society cannot perpetuate lies and deliberate forgetfulness forever,” said Eberts, who serves as Germany’s de facto representative to the nation, at a forum held at the Taipei Jinan church of the Taiwan Presbyterian Church.
He discussed two separate rounds of German transitional justice that targeted the atrocities committed by the former Nazi government and East Germany’s communist regime, saying that Germany had opened all documents related to both regimes.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the beginning of the Berlin Wall’s construction.
Publicizing the atrocities was crucial to transitional justice, along with reconciliation and compensation, Eberts said, adding that transitional justice had to be realized at an individual as well as a collective level.
“How to face history is something that every generation has to do — not just the generation which directly participated,” he said, adding that demands of Germany’s 1968 student movements had included calls for a more thorough repudiation of the nation’s Nazi past.
Translation was provided by Soochow University German language professor Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉), who has been appointed to his former post as the nation’s representative to Germany.
Other speakers at the forum included political commentator Yao Li-ming (姚立明) and Judicial Reform Foundation chairman Joseph Lin (林永頌).
Yao said that Taiwan’s situation was different from Germany’s in that intelligence agencies were never formally disbanded, raising questions about whether all documentation related to former abuses had been made public.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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