The Taiwan Transitional Justice Database is to be launched before the end of the year, Transitional Justice Commission Chairwoman Yang Tsui (楊翠) said on Friday.
The database is to be a free, public-access, virtual archive of government documents pertaining to White Terror-era trials and is to draw records from the National Archives Administration, the National Human Rights Museum and the Ministry of National Defense, Yang said.
The commission has files on 97,000 people who faced trial and they are to be uploaded next month and reviewed before publication, she said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The administrative and legal documents shed light on the institutional structure and inner workings of military jurisprudence during the White Terror era, enabling researchers to identify the real decisionmakers of the time, she said.
While the documents suggests that Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) had the final say in trial outcomes, military prosecutors and judges were not completely subservient and at times offered “soft resistance” by objecting in writing to Chiang’s directives, she said.
For example, Chiang in 1965 ordered a tribunal to hand down the death sentence to seven defendants, among them Shih Yu-wei (史予為), she said.
Almost every defense official involved, including Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), demurred, recommending prison sentences of 12 to 15 years, and they spelled out their objections to Chiang Kai-shek in more than 10 official documents, she said.
Although Chiang Kai-shek put his foot down, the episode showed that the state was not a monolith, Yang said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS