Taipei stands as one of the safest capital cities the world. Taiwan has exceptionally low crime rates — lower than many European nations — and is one of Asia’s leading democracies, respected for its rule of law and commitment to human rights.
It is among the few Asian countries to have given legal effect to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Social Economic and Cultural Rights. Yet Taiwan continues to uphold the death penalty.
This year, the government has taken a number of regressive steps: Executions have resumed, proposals for harsher prison sentences have surfaced and sentences for life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) are under consideration. This shift is driven less by crime than by politics, and risks producing laws that are unjust, disproportionate and at odds with Taiwan’s democratic ideals and accords.
Last year, the Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. In doing so, the court missed a historic opportunity to end Taiwan’s use of the death penalty and align with the global trend toward abolition. The decision was profoundly disappointing. The court was presented with clear evidence that capital punishment neither protects society nor deters serious crime. Instead, it is arbitrary, discriminatory, and violates the right to life and the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
While the court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, it restricted its use: Capital punishment may apply only to the most serious homicides, defendants with mental illness are exempt, defendants must have legal representation at all stages, and death sentences must be unanimous at trial and appeal. Yet this created an uneasy and unworkable compromise — safeguarding due process and fundamental human rights of those facing execution while preserving the state’s power to execute citizens.
This contradiction was laid bare when 32-year-old Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱) was executed on Jan. 16, just months after the ruling. His execution — carried out summarily with only a few hours’ notice and without proper review — defied the court’s instructions for the prosecutor general to re-examine all pending death sentences. Why Huang was singled out to be killed remains unexplained, except as an act of political opportunism.
What could have motivated the minister of justice to sign an execution warrant under such circumstances? One explanation might lie in dissatisfaction with the Constitutional Court’s judgement. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led Legislative Yuan blocked judicial nominees seen as abolitionist and amended court procedures to limit constitutional rulings. The government then ordered Huang’s execution, signaling defiance of the court. In April, the Ministry of Justice revised the Regulations for Executing the Death Penalty (執行死刑規則) so that pending appeals no longer stay executions.
With the revision, an additional court ruling is required to halt an execution — an unnecessary, regressive and dangerous reform that clearly violates international minimum standards. These developments have stalled Taiwan’s earlier progress toward abolition and damaged its international reputation, for the death penalty has no place in a democracy that claims to uphold the rule of law. To endorse the death penalty is to endorse torture.
The same political motives underpin KMT’s proposal to add LWOP — a sentence that condemns a person to die in prison without any prospect of review or release — to Taiwan’s penal code while retaining the death penalty. To introduce LWOP alongside the death penalty would entrench a dual system of death sentences, giving the state the power to execute its citizens or to impose what has been described as “death by incarceration.”
Both sentences extinguish hope, deny the possibility of rehabilitation and have been recognized internationally as cruel, inhuman and degrading forms of punishment. Experience elsewhere shows how deeply problematic adopting LWOP sentences can be. In the US more than 56,000 people are serving LWOP, many elderly and infirm, with prisons turning into de facto geriatric wards.
Taiwan has already witnessed the despair such hopelessness breeds: In 2015, six people serving life sentences instigated a hostage crisis to protest against excessive sentences and the lack of any realistic prospect of release, before killing themselves. That incident points toward the urgent need for reform, not harsher life sentences.
By contrast, European countries and other jurisdictions have moved firmly in the opposite direction. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that life sentences must always be reducible, with a meaningful chance of being considered for release.
Constitutional courts in Belize, Germany, Italy and Zimbabwe and elsewhere have struck down LWOP as incompatible with the principle of human dignity, affirming that while life sentences might be indefinite, they must always preserve the possibility of rehabilitation, review and release — otherwise they amount to a death sentence by another name. To introduce LWOP would leave Taiwan isolated — out of step not only with international standards, but with the fairness, dignity and humanity that underpin its own democratic aspirations.
Taiwan is not without a path forward. Around the world, countries once committed to the death penalty have shown that change is possible. Policymakers, civil society, lawyers, academics and ordinary citizens have worked together to build systems that uphold justice and human dignity without resorting to irreversible penalties. Taiwan has a strong, vibrant community of advocates who continue to press for reform, often in the face of political headwinds.
The global trend is clear: states are moving away from the death penalty and LWOP, recognizing that justice cannot be built on punishments that extinguish all hope. By doing the same, Taiwan would align with international human rights standards and show that justice can protect society while still upholding dignity, fairness and the human capacity for change — strengthening its democracy and its standing in the global community.
Catherine Appleton is deputy chair of Penal Reform International and senior research fellow at the Centre for Research and Education in Security, Prisons and Forensic Psychiatry at St Olavs University Hospital in Trondheim, Norway. Saul Lehrfreund is co-executive director of The Death Penalty Project, visiting professor of law at the University of Reading and honorary professor at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol.
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