On Dec. 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in 1950 it designated Dec. 10 as Human Rights Day to encourage people to show concern for human rights problems all over the world.
On Dec. 10, 1984, the assembly voted to adopt the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, with the aim of preventing human rights violations in the form of torture from happening anywhere in the world.
To date, the convention against torture has been ratified by 158 nations.
The convention defines “torture” as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession.”
In Taiwan in 1982, a taxi driver named Wang Ying-hsien (王迎先) took his own life after being wrongfully accused and tortured. In 1997, a soldier named Chiang Kuo-ching (江國慶) was executed for murder, but was later found to have been innocent. Death penalties were wrongfully imposed on Su Chien-ho (蘇建和), Liu Bing-lang (劉秉郎) and Chuang Lin-hsun (莊林勳), known as the “Hsichih Trio,” as well as Hsu Tzu-chiang (徐自強) and Cheng Hsing-tse (鄭性澤).
In all these cases, the accused were forced to confess under torture, but their confessions were later found to be false and excluded when courts retried their cases and they were found not guilty. There are other cases in which those convicted are still waiting for their names to be cleared, including Chiou Ho-shun (邱和順) and Su Ping-kun (蘇炳坤), who were unjustly imprisoned after being tortured. It makes one shudder to think what these people have gone through.
It is plain to see that one of the common points that led to all these cases of wrongful conviction is that law enforcers investigating and prosecuting major criminal cases have a bad habit of using torture and other kinds of inhumane treatment to obtain confessions, and that the courts rely too much on confessions that are unreliable. The verdicts that result from such practices not only cause unjust suffering or even death of innocent people, but also prevent victims and their families from finding out what really happened. Such cases also badly damage the judiciary’s credibility.
In March 2009, Taiwan incorporated two UN human rights covenants — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights — into its domestic law by passing an act on their implementation, which took effect on Dec. 10 that year.
Article 7 of the ICCPR says: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and Article 14, Paragraph 3 (g) stipulates that everyone accused of an offense is entitled “not to be compelled to testify against himself or to confess guilt.” This is the most basic standard for safeguarding human rights during criminal investigations and trials, so of course law enforcers should take it as a guiding principle.
In March 2013, a group of 10 independent experts in international human rights were invited to Taiwan to assess the nation’s implementation of the human-rights covenants.
In their concluding observations and recommendations, the experts said: “Fighting impunity of perpetrators of torture is one of the most effective means to eradicate torture and other forms of ill-treatment. The Experts, therefore, recommend that the Government of Taiwan insert the crime of torture, as defined in Article 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture, as a separate crime with adequate penalties in its Criminal Code.”
They recommended that Taiwan’s government “should also set up the type of national preventive mechanism envisaged under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture.”
However, four years later, when the assessment committee members made their second evaluation in January, they found that the aforementioned recommendations had still not been implemented. Aside from expressing their deep disappointment, they reiterated that the offense of torture should be added to the Criminal Code.
For Taiwan to genuinely implement the requirement of Article 7 of the ICCPR and effectively respond to the opinions raised in the international covenants assessment, it should draw up a law on the implementation of the convention against torture. By doing so, Taiwan would incorporate the convention and its optional protocol into its domestic law so that it can serve as the legal basis for prohibiting torture.
The Ministry of Justice should also drop its selfish departmentalist mindset and accept sincere advice. It should review the articles of the Criminal Code and deliberate on how to amend them to make Taiwan’s legal framework for prohibiting torture more comprehensive and robust.
Apart from this, the main purpose of setting up a national preventive mechanism would be to prevent torture from happening in places where personal liberty is restricted or removed. To avoid bureaucratic redundancy, a good way to achieve this would be to add a torture prevention committee to the Control Yuan’s Committee on Human Rights Protection and merge them into a torture prevention and human rights protection committee, which could use the existing committee’s powers of inspection, investigation, correction and impeachment.
This would help deter torture and other kinds of inhumane treatment, reduce the occurrence of cases of injustice and safeguard human rights.
Su Yiu-chen is a lawyer.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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