A group of UK human rights experts yesterday said that it requires strong political leadership to steer a nation toward completely doing away with capital punishment.
Leading a delegation of three people on a three-day visit to Taiwan, British Member of Parliament Keir Starmer told a news conference in Taipei that strong public disapproval is an issue that confronts every nation that moves away from the use of the death penalty.
“It certainly confronted the UK when we abolished the death penalty,” Starmer said. “At that time public opinion was in favor of death penalty.”
“Almost every country made the argument that there is something special about their cultural traditions which require it to keep the death penalty,” said Starmer, cofounder of a London-based law firm that specializes in civil liberties and human rights.
With President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration pledging to be a government guided by public opinion, Starmer said that there were three things that helped prompt changes in the UK five decades ago to restrict the use of capital punishment.
“The first was strong political leadership, which said: ‘This sentence is wrong in principle and we will have nothing more to do with it,’” he said.
As most people only talk about the death penalty in the abstract, he said the second motivator was to offer the public a glimpse into how capital punishment was actually carried out.
When people saw how it worked in practice, they were very uncomfortable with the death penalty, he added.
Starmer said the third element was that capital punishment has become an indicator of whether a country is progressive, forward-looking and wanting to join the family of countries that have gotten rid of the death penalty.
“Or, whether it wants to be seen by others as being stuck in the past with countries that are unwilling to change,” Starmer said, adding that courageous political leadership combined with a better understanding of the death penalty could cause public opinions to change.
Starmer declined to reveal details of his meeting with Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) and Minister of Justice Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) on Wednesday, saying only that the discussions were “constructive.”
As one of three democracies worldwide that still carry out death sentences, Taiwan has executed 33 death-row inmates since 2010, with the last one being Taipei MRT killer Cheng Chieh (鄭捷) in May last year. There are 41 people on death row.
Death Penalty Project co-executive director Saul Lehrfreund, who is a member of the delegation, said research he has done with academics, universities and criminologists show that public perceptions of capital punishment are not black-and-white.
“For example, if you ask the public an abstract question: ‘Do you support the death penalty?’ It is very probable that the vast majority of people would support the death penalty,” Lehrfreund said.
“However, if you ask people how strongly they support the death penalty, you will find the majority of people do not come back and say they support the death penalty strongly,” Lehrfreund said. “They may support it, but not so much that they would not accept changes.”
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