Last month, the National Security Bureau (NSB) announced that it had fully declassified all political archives from the martial law period and transferred them to the National Archives Administration (NAA). A total of 140,758 files were released. Of these, 89,625 were uncovered in more than eight rounds of archival reviews since the 2000 changeover of ruling parties, while 51,133 were identified through the agency’s “independent inventory” of archived materials, conducted in line with the Political Archives Act (政治檔案條例).
These archives existed somewhere long before the Archives Act (檔案法) of 2002 and the Political Archives Act of 2019. With the rollout of the new archival management system, Article 12 of the Enforcement Rule of the Archives Act (檔案法施行細則) stipulates that: “Government agencies shall complete the retrospective cataloging of the records which were made before the enforcement of the Act and which are still within the retention periods. The retrospective catalog of records with permanent preservation value shall be completed within five years from the date on which the Act enters into force; the retrospective catalog of records with temporary preservation value shall be completed within seven years.”
However, what the Archives Act did not do was set penalties for agencies that failed to complete their retroactive cataloging by the designated deadlines. The NAA has also found it difficult to exercise oversight over record-holding agencies in practice. These files have always been stored in agency repositories, yet each round of the past eight reviews has managed to unearth “new” files.
Meanwhile, the specially introduced Political Archives Act is entering its seventh year in force, even though all archives designated for permanent or fixed-term preservation should have already been retrospectively catalogued according to the original Act.
It is certainly a good thing that the NSB has been willing to conduct this “independent inventory.” However, if the NAA, as the authority responsible for archival management, lacks power in public enforcement, it can only passively receive transferred records. In other words, the review and transfer of these archives are led by the record-holding agencies themselves, with no effective external oversight mechanism.
Other files, such as the Ministry of National Defense’s archives on confiscated property, have still not been reviewed or transferred. Since the NAA is unable to meaningfully assess the status of retrospective cataloguing across agencies, relying on each agency’s “independent inventories” makes it impossible to determine how many political archives actually exist.
If a government body such as the NAA faces such limitations, it begs the question of whether the Restoration of Victims’ Rights Infringed by Illegal Acts of the State During the Period of Authoritarian Rule Foundation, which is responsible for compensating and restoring justice to victims and their families, truly has sufficient authority to handle these matters. Whether the ministry would actually disclose how much private property was confiscated from citizens throughout the martial law period is another issue. Without accountability over the review of these political archives, when would truth and justice be returned to the families of victims? To genuinely advance transitional justice, I hope that the government can grant relevant authorities sufficient public powers to establish a truly accountable mechanism for reviewing political archives.
Lien Ko is a doctoral candidate at National Cheng Chi University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan History.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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