The Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty yesterday accused the government of having an ambiguous stance on the issue of death penalty and urged it stop executions immediately.
Holding up signs stating their names and the words “I demand an end to executions,” more than 50 people — social activists, academics, attorneys, environmentalists and artists — called on the government to cease executions right away.
In April, Taiwan ended a four-year de facto moratorium on capital punishment by executing four of the 44 inmates on death row.
PHOTO: PATRICK LIN, AFP
On Friday, the Constitutional Court rejected a petition filed by the alliance for a constitutional interpretation on the legality of the death penalty, saying the execution of death row prisoners does not contravene the two UN covenants of which Taiwan is a signatory, referring to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that the legislature passed on March 31 last year.
The ruling clears the way for the execution of the 40 inmates who remain on death row.
“With the backing of the president, the premier, the minister of justice, the prosecutor general, the media and the Judicial Yuan, Taiwan has been filled with calls to kill,” said Chiu Hei-yuan (瞿海源), a sociology research fellow at Academia Sinica and convener of the alliance.
“These government officials have made Taiwan a conservative, indifferent, blood-thirsty and irrational country where people talk about morality but care nothing about human rights,” he said. “The president claims that abolishing capital punishment is the government’s ultimate goal, but it cannot wait to execute people. He has never explained how capital punishment would be abolished.”
Commenting on Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu’s (曾勇夫) statement that it took European countries hundreds of years to abolish the death penalty, Chiu said: “I wonder which year did he start counting?”
Alliance executive director Lin Hsin-yi (林欣怡) said that only China, North Korea, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Taiwan have executed prisoners in Asia this year.
“But we are a signatory of the ... [UN covenants], do we want to form an ‘Asian alliance for the death penalty’ with those non-signatory countries?” he asked.
Attorney Wellington Koo (顧立雄) called on President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to make clear his stance on the issue and come up with a concrete timetable for abolishing the death penalty.
“I hope that the president would follow the example of the late French president Francois Mitterrand, who, despite the opposition of the majority in his country at the time, openly supported abolishing capital punishment during his presidential campaign and kept his promise after he was elected,” Koo said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
RSS