There are many obstacles before files from the White Terror era deposited at the Ministry of Culture can be made public, Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) said yesterday.
She made the comment at a news conference in Taipei called to announce the ministry’s plans to manage the collection of files on former political prisoners which it inherited from the Compensation Foundation for Improper Verdicts in September after the foundation wrapped up its operations.
The semi-official foundation was set up on Dec. 17, 1998, with funds donated by the government to compensate the victims and families of victims of the White Terror era, a period of political oppression under Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) authoritarian rule.
It collected copies of a wide range of documents related to the cases it handled, including records of court procedures and confessions.
The ministry said that while the files have yet to be fully catalogued, it is likely that many documents, such as individual confessions, have never been published.
Taiwan has not yet completed the process of facing head-on the oppressive era, Lung said.
“Even though the ruling party has changed twice, neither of the major parties has done anything really profound in terms of furthering transitional justice,” she said, defining “transitional justice” as bringing to light and coming to terms with the details of oppression.
While the ministry hopes to remedy this by making portions of the files public as part of its efforts build a National Human Rights Museum, it faces a number of challenges in realizing its objective, she said.
The ministry’s priority is to establish a temperature-controlled storage area and then begin organizing and editing the 10,067 files, which will be a “huge” project estimated to take until 2016 to complete, she said. Under the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法), the ministry must remove personal details in any documents it publishes, she added.
In addition, the ministry faces legal obstacles in publishing the copies of document it holds.
“Half of my heart went cold when I found out that 90 percent of the documents were copies,” Lung said.
She said there were concerns that the agencies which possess the original documents could veto publication of the copies.
The originals are kept by the National Archives Administration and the Ministry of National Defense.
The culture ministry is in the process of confirming whether the copies in its possession can be treated as its own internal documents, she added.
Lung said that in determining how to publicize the documents, the ministry must also avoid their being used for political ends or personal vengeance, adding that based on the experience of other countries there could be a substantial amount of false or manufactured information within the documents.
In the short term, the ministry intends to publish digital files of the case verdicts within the next two months, but the timeline for publication of further documents is undetermined.
Additional reporting by CNA
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