A visiting former UN special rapporteur on torture has vowed to have his successor “take up the case” of a Taiwanese death row inmate who was tortured by police and has been on trial for nearly 23 years.
Manfred Nowak, who served as UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatments or punishments from 2004 to last year, said on Tuesday that he was not able to handle the case of Chiu Ho-shun (邱和順) because he did not receive a complaint until the end of his mandate.
However, now that a Taiwanese group has filed a complaint, Nowak said he would ask his successor, Juan Mendez, to investigate Chiu’s case and that he would inform Mendez that he had met the death row prisoner.
Nowak, a professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, visited Chiu at the Taipei Detention Center earlier on Tuesday.
In late July, the Supreme Court ended the lengthy trial by upholding the death sentence for Chiu, who was convicted of abducting and murdering a schoolchild from Hsinchu City in December 1987.
Chiu was detained for four months when the crime was being investigated. After being convicted and sentenced to death for the first time in 1989, he was put in prison. He has remained there while his conviction was repeatedly appealed.
Documented videos and recordings have proved that Chiu and his accomplices were tortured by police during their four months in detention when confessions were extracted. Their confessions were later presented as key evidence in court, according to lawyers familiar with the case.
That Chiu’s confession was --extracted through torture and that his sentence was based on such a confession violates the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Nowak said at a seminar in Taipei.
“Twenty-three years of criminal trial is an obvious violation of the covenant,” the human rights expert said.
Despite the Chiu case, Nowak still praised the development of human rights in Taiwan in the past few years since he first visited the country.
Among Taiwan’s efforts to protect human rights are the -Legislative Yuan’s ratification of the ICCPR and the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2009.
“I am very happy to hear that both covenants have been ratified by Taiwan,” Nowak said.
He said that the application of these covenants in Taiwan’s domestic laws would help prevent lengthy trials as seen in the Chiu case.
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