The Transitional Justice Commission has said that it has succeeded in having content on state-perpetrated violence included in civic education curricula, which would allow students in primary and secondary schools to learn about transitional justice and its importance.
The 12-year National Education curricula for social science includes material on war, state-perpetrated violence, freedom, democracy and human rights, but not transitional justice, commission member Peng Jen-yu (彭仁郁) said.
With the help of the Ministry of Education, transitional justice has been added to the “human rights and civic education interim program” so that teachers would instruct students about transitional justice and include it as a metric for evaluating teachers’ performance, Peng said.
As transitional justice is a relatively new issue for Taiwanese, few teachers have the skills needed to teach it, she said.
Instruction on how to teach the topic has been added to teacher education programs, she said, adding that the ministry gave the commission a list of teachers competent to teach the subject.
Some civic education teachers engaged in experimental education have gotten ahead of the curve, introducing students to the 228 Incident and the White Terror era, and having them view Vindication — a documentary on the nation’s authoritarian era — which show students how the government used to trample Taiwanese’s human rights while teaching them the importance of rule of law.
The Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) stipulates that retrials should be granted where rulings from the White Terror era contradict the Constitution, freedom and democracy, or the principle of fairness, she said.
The commission has summarized each case of injustice that it has redressed, she said, adding that the summaries could also be used as teaching materials.
“The first step is to identify the one who violated human rights, which was the [authoritarian] state,” Peng said.
Education under Taiwan’s authoritarian regime poisoned students so that many teachers have yet to fully grasp what pursuing transitional justice means, she said, adding that they have yet to acknowledge the atrocities.
Any means that an authoritarian government uses to consolidate its rule — such as arbitrarily convicting dissidents and sending them to re-education programs — is a travesty of democracy and a constitutional system, and teachers must recognize this truth before they can teach the topic, she said.
Established in 2018, the commission has found through its investigations at schools that teachers who instruct students about transitional justice — even decades after the nation’s democratization — have been suppressed by school administrators, received complaints from parents or been ostracized by their colleagues, she said.
The aim of transitional justice is not political one-upmanship, but the restoration of historical facts, she said.
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
TO BE APPEALED: The environment ministry said coal reduction goals had to be reached within two months, which was against the principle of legitimate expectation The Taipei High Administrative Court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Taichung Environmental Protection Bureau in its administrative litigation against the Ministry of Environment for the rescission of a NT$18 million fine (US$609,570) imposed by the bureau on the Taichung Power Plant in 2019 for alleged excess coal power generation. The bureau in November 2019 revised what it said was a “slip of the pen” in the text of the operating permit granted to the plant — which is run by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) — in October 2017. The permit originally read: “reduce coal use by 40 percent from Jan.
‘SPEY’ REACTION: Beijing said its Eastern Theater Command ‘organized troops to monitor and guard the entire process’ of a Taiwan Strait transit China sent 74 warplanes toward Taiwan between late Thursday and early yesterday, 61 of which crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait. It was not clear why so many planes were scrambled, said the Ministry of National Defense, which tabulated the flights. The aircraft were sent in two separate tranches, the ministry said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday “confirmed and welcomed” a transit by the British Royal Navy’s HMS Spey, a River-class offshore patrol vessel, through the Taiwan Strait a day earlier. The ship’s transit “once again [reaffirmed the Strait’s] status as international waters,” the foreign ministry said. “Such transits by
Taiwan is doing everything it can to prevent a military conflict with China, including building up asymmetric defense capabilities and fortifying public resilience, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said in a recent interview. “Everything we are doing is to prevent a conflict from happening, whether it is 2027 or before that or beyond that,” Hsiao told American podcaster Shawn Ryan of the Shawn Ryan Show. She was referring to a timeline cited by several US military and intelligence officials, who said Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to be ready to take military action against Taiwan
RSS