A committee to facilitate transitional justice is to be established soon, after a consensus was reached this week at a policy coordination meeting on the legal framework necessary to oversee the process, Cabinet spokesperson Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) announced.
A High-level Policy Coordination Meeting between the Cabinet and the Democratic Progressive Party caucus confirmed that the committee would investigate cases from Oct. 5, 1945, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) arrived in Taiwan, to Nov. 16, 1992, when the then-KMT government ended martial law, Hsu said.
The committee is to be a “level-2” government agency and have seven members, of whom four will be serving on it full-time, Hsu said.
Except for the chairperson, whom President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is to name as a special appointee, the vice chairperson and two other full-time members of the committee would be civil servants ranked level 13 or level 14 and in the civil service system, Hsu said.
The appointments of the four full-time members of the committee would be confirmed by the Legislative Yuan, he said, adding that the remaining three members would be nominated by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Culture and Academica Historica.
The meeting also addressed whether political archives and the restoration of justice for those who were convicted by a flawed judicial process during the Martial Law Era should be listed in the draft regulations, but the meeting failed to reach a conclusion on those two key issues, Hsu said.
“Members considered that there should be separate regulations for the handling of political archives. Since the KMT began to govern Taiwan, the KMT’s history has become part of the nation’s history, as it ruled the nation as a one-party authoritarian regime. There is no doubt that the nation’s political archives are connected with the history of the KMT,” he said. “The committee would be espousing a very narrow focus if political archives are simply handled from the perspective of human rights. The definition of political archives that would be handled by the proposed regulations requires further discussion.”
More articles could be added to the proposed regulations if the government seeks justice for, or to restore the reputation of, people who were convicted without trial, but no conclusion was reached on that matter, Hsu said.
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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