Participants in a forum outside the national legislature in Taipei City during the ‘Sunflower’ occupation in April, 2014, call for the principles of distributional justice and direct democracy to be inserted into Taiwan’s constitution. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Feb 5 2015 (IPS)

“The clock is ticking.” Those were the words of Taiwan Democracy Watch Director Yeh Chueh-an on Feb. 4, as scores of civil society organisations in the capital, Taipei, began a countdown for a citizen-based rewriting of Taiwan’s constitution aimed at safeguarding human rights and social equity.

Composed of over 20 human rights and social activist organisations, the Alliance for the Promotion of a Citizen Constitutional Council has launched a campaign for an overhaul of Taiwan’s political framework that, for the first time, could feature the “bottom–up” participation of the country’s 23 million citizens.

“Citizens, not political elites, must be the subjects of constitutional reform." -- National University Professor of Political Science Chen Chun-hung
The digital clock was set at 116 days and 12 hours – meaning a deadline of May 31, marking the end of the current session of Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan.

Proposed constitutional amendments must first be approved by three fourths of Taiwan’s 112-seat national legislature and announced six months in advance of a national referendum in which at least half of Taiwan’s over 18 million eligible voters must vote “yes” if the changes are to be ratified.

Draft amendments to the constitution – including one prepared by opposition legislator Cheng Li-chun  – are likely to include safeguards on human dignity, freedom of residence, assistance for the destitute, better working conditions, and confidential communications and privacy.

On Jan. 12, the Alliance to Promote a Citizen Constitutional Council proposed a two-stage process in which a ‘national affairs conference’ would bring political parties, legislators, civil society organisations and other civic leaders together to brainstorm how best to bring about grassroots-based constitutional changes.

“Citizens, not political elites, must be the subjects of constitutional reform,” said National University Professor of Political Science Chen Chun-hung.

“We must set in place robust procedures for ordinary people to participate and feel a close connection and involvement in this process if it is to succeed,” added Chen, also a director of Taiwan Democracy Watch.

Breaking China’s historic hold

The current constitution of the ‘Republic of China’ (Taiwan’s official name) was drafted in mainland China, and imposed on Taiwan by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government of the late autocrat Chiang Kai-shek after the KMT lost the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s.

Its modest provisions for democratic and citizen rights were deep-frozen during four decades of martial law rule through the late 1980s.

Seven sets of revisions through “additional articles” spurred by Taiwan’s first native-born president Lee Teng-hui in the 1990s left Taiwan with a democratically elected but unwieldy political system in which power and responsibility are not commensurate.

Although directly elected, the president has no direct role in state administration; the premier or head of government is appointed by the president and is not responsible to the national legislature; and no feasible methods exist to resolve deadlocks between the executive and legislative branches.

“We have a system in which the president can do what he wants with impunity and there is no way that the people or even the legislature can stop him no matter how low his support is or how unpopular his policies [are],” said Economic Democracy Union convenor Lai Chung-chiang.

“The existing governmental system is unable to solve the pressing and urgent problems faced by the people, including issues impinging on their right of survival [such as] lax food safety, wealth inequality, threats to their right of residence and inadequate social welfare,” added Taiwan Labour Front Secretary-General Sun Yu-lien.

Once considered impossible due to opposition by President Ma Ying-jeou and his hard-line KMT government, the question of constitutional re-engineering was re-energised during the past year of social and political activism, punctuated by the Mar. 18-Apr. 10 ‘Sunflower Movement’ occupation of Taiwan’s national legislature.

The occupation was touched off by Ma’s insistence on ramming through the legislature a bill to ratify a controversial Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement with China despite widespread concerns that the covertly negotiated pact would harm local industries and employment, exacerbate wealth inequalities and undermine democratic freedoms.

The campaign, which included a mass rally of over 300,000 on Mar. 30, stymied the pact’s ratification and was followed by street demonstrations in late April 2014 that scuttled plans to complete a bitterly contested 10- billion-dollar nuclear power plant.

During the occupation, activists called for a Citizen Constitutional Council and held democratic deliberations among several thousand citizens on its agenda.

But it was not until the ruling KMT suffered a severe electoral defeat in nationwide mayoral elections this past November that the feasibility of constitutional change emerged on the immediate political agenda.

The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won 13 mayoral posts, compared to six for the ruling KMT and three for independent candidates, including prominent surgeon Ko Wen-je, who won the nation’s capital of Taipei City.

A survey of 1,069 Taiwanese adults released last December by Taiwan Thinktank showed that nearly 60 percent of those polled saw the mayoral elections as a vote of no confidence in the Ma government and its pro-China and pro-conglomerate policies.

The debacle triggered Ma’s resignation from the KMT chairmanship on Dec. 3. Although Ma remains president, the moderate New Taipei City Mayor Chu Li-lun replaced him as ruling party leader on Jan. 19 and called for constitutional amendments to move Taiwan toward a cabinet system of government.

A research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Jurisprudence, Huang Kuo-chang, told IPS that the March occupation exposed to the Taiwan people the grave dysfunction of the political system, adding, “The Nov. 29 elections have finally forced the KMT to consider the necessity of constitutional reform.”

Securing basic rights

In December, the KMT and DPP legislative caucuses formed task forces on constitutional revision, but the two parties remain mainly concerned with revamping the central government structure and the legislative election system.

However, the top priority for social activist and human rights organisations is securing the equivalent of a constitutional Bill of Rights.

As National Taiwan University Professor of Law Chen Chao-ju noted, “[C]onstitutions in other new democracies, such as South Africa, have special provisions to ensure substantive equality and social justice.

“We need to incorporate detailed provisions to protect basic human and social rights from discrimination or infringement by the state and substantive abrogation by government-business collusion,” she added.

Such changes could help people uphold and defend, among other things, their own labour rights, in a country that is consistently failing to provide equally for all its citizens.

Although the unemployment rate fell slightly in 2014 to 3.96 percent, the lowest since the KMT returned to power, joblessness among youth (15-24 years of age) averaged 12.63 percent that same year.

Taiwan’s unemployment rate was higher than Japan’s (3.5 percent), South Korea (3.4 percent) and Hong Kong (3.3 percent).

Meanwhile, according to the official Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, the share of labour compensation to gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.87 percentage points to 44.65 percent in 2013, the second lowest in Taiwan’s history. During the same period, the ratio of enterprise profits to GDP rose by 1.41 percentage points to 33.45 percent.

“The fruits of economic growth have been taken by conglomerates and major stockholders while wages have stagnated and the numbers of working poor have continued to rise,” summed up Taiwan Labour Front Secretary-General Sun You-lien.

All across the spectrum, ordinary citizens and experts on social, economic and political policy are counting down the days for constitutional reform that could usher in an era of democracy and development that many here had started to believe was unattainable.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A worker, farmer and doctor are hanged in the “Suicide Zone” outside of Taiwan’s national legislature, in a street theater protest by student groups against government efforts to establish “Free Economy Pilot Zones” across Taiwan. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Sep 11 2014 (IPS)

The Taiwan government’s plan to liberalise tariff-free imports of agricultural produce from China and other countries for processing in free economic pilot zones, which will then be exported as ‘Made in Taiwan’ items, may mean suicide for Taiwanese farmers if approved by the national legislature.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government of President Ma Ying-jeou conceived the Free Economic Pilot Zone (FEPZ) plan in 2012 as a way to urge Taiwanese investors in China to relocate value added operations back to Taiwan, through tax and other incentives.

In early 2013, the KMT government re-packaged the plan to feature components for the promotion of value-added agriculture and international medical services, among others, and submitted required changes in the legal code to implement the plan in a draft Free Economic Pilot Zone Special Act to the KMT-controlled Legislature in December 2013.

“The intention of the Ma government to lift the ban on Chinese agricultural commodities through the FEPZ special act violates his own promise in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, but dovetails with Beijing’s objective of cross-strait economic integration." -- Lai Chung-chiang, convenor of the Democratic Front Against Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement
The special act offers investors in FEPZs business tax exemptions, tariff-free importation of industrial or agricultural raw materials, eased entry and income tax breaks for foreign professional workers, including from China, and streamlined procedures for customs and quarantine checks, labour safety inspections and environmental impact assessments.

Social movement groups have warned that the China-friendly KMT government aims to use the FEPZ programme as a back door to realise full deregulation of trade between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, and avoid the need for legislative ratification of trade pacts after the Sunflower citizen and student occupation movement in March derailed a controversial service trade pact between the two governments.

Lai Chung-chiang, convenor of the Democratic Front Against Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement, observed that the Sunflower movement spurred the formation of a consensus in Taiwan that the Legislature should enact a law strictly governing the negotiation of cross-strait agreements before reviewing the ‘trade in services’ agreement or other pacts with China.

Fearing indefinite delays in future China trade deals, the Ma government tried to ram a first reading of the draft FEPZ special act through the national legislature’s economic affairs committee in two extraordinary sessions in July and August, but opposition lawmakers blocked this push.

Lai told IPS that the core of the FEPZ concept is to arbitrarily grant tariff-free entry for raw materials and products from all countries into Taiwan’s six main seaports and its major international airport in order to display Taiwan’s interest to enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other regional free trade pacts.

Instead, this act will sell out Taiwan’s economic future, warned Lai, adding, “Our major trade partners will have no reason to engage in negotiations with us to further open their markets as our government will have surrendered all of our bargaining chips even before talks begin.”

“The intention of the Ma government to lift the ban on Chinese agricultural commodities through the FEPZ special act violates his own promise in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, but dovetails with Beijing’s objective of cross-strait economic integration,” Lai added.

Despite a high-powered advertising campaign, the Taiwan public is not visibly enthusiastic about the FEPZ plan. Nearly 63 percent of respondents in a poll carried out by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)’s Public Survey Center in June said they were worried about the scheme’s impact on Taiwan’s economy.

Labour organisations are leery of further liberalisation of foreign workers, including white-collar professionals from China, while medical and educational organisations object to plans to offer health and educational tourism programmes that would spur the commodification of public services.

Raw deal for local farmers

Chen Chi-chung, a professor at the National Chung Hsing University Agricultural Policy Center, stated, “Taiwan may become the first producer of agricultural goods that will permit agricultural produce from all over the world, including China, to be used for processing in its own factories free of tariffs or business taxes.”

Article 42 of the draft special act would fully lift the current ban on import from China of 2,186 types of raw materials, including 830 types of agricultural commodities, while Article 38 would exempt FEPZ enterprises from tariffs, cargo levies and business income taxes. Article 41 would exempt most such commodities from customs or health inspections.

Moreover, makers of processed agricultural goods or foods exported from FEPZs will be able to attach ‘Made in Taiwan’ labels to their products.

Rural Life Experimental Farm Director Liao Chih-heng told IPS that instead of helping farmers cope with the unfair competition from producers in China due to state subsidies and lower labour and environmental costs, the Ma government is inviting such unfair competition into our home market.

Tai Chen-yao, a farmer of squash and lemons in Kaohsiung City in southern Taiwan, told IPS, “If Taiwan sells processed Chinese agricultural goods as Made in Taiwan, food processors as well as farmers will be hurt since there will be no way to guarantee the safety or quality of raw material and thus the food safety for consumers of such products.”

Su Chih-fen, Yunlin County Mayor for the opposition DPP, echoed these sentiments, telling IPS that a rising share of Taiwan farmers, including youth who are returning to the countryside, are absorbing new knowledge and creating innovative agricultural products that can out-compete imports, which may be cheaper but have higher food safety risks.

The value-added agriculture plan would deprive this emerging cohort of new style farmers of access to export markets and divert resources away from assisting the majority of farmers to upgrade, said Su, who is mayor of Taiwan’s agricultural capital.

Agriculture accounted for 1.7 percent of Taiwan’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013. Primary sector workers in agriculture, forestry, fishing and livestock accounted for nearly five percent of Taiwan’s 10.97-million-strong workforce or 544,000 persons as of May 2014.

Su further warned that the government’s plan would effectively punish farmers who kept their roots in Taiwan and have worked to upgrade and grow high quality produce.

In the wake of such widespread criticism, the official National Development Commission (NDC) has announced modifications including dropping the provision that 10 percent of agriculture value-added goods made with raw materials from China could be sold on the domestic market.

However, Chen Chi-chung declared that the changes, along with the NDC’s claim that processed foods made in the FEPZ using imported materials from China or other low-cost suppliers would not enter or affect Taiwan’s domestic market, were deceptive semantics.

Using imported raw agriculture materials, such as tea or peanuts, to make processed food products in Taiwan will surely reduce the demand for domestic agricultural products and thus the income of Taiwan farmers, said Chen.

According to the Council of Agriculture’s statistics, average annual income for a farm household in 2012 was about 33,200 dollars; however, the net income from farming activities was only 7,200 dollars.

KMT Legislative Caucus Convenor Fei Hung-tai told IPS that the majority KMT caucus aims to actively promote passage of the FEPZ statute during the upcoming session.

Noting that civil society organisations and opposition parties have called for the elimination of Articles 38, 41, 42 and other provisions harmful to the interests of Taiwan farmers, workers and public services, Lai told IPS, “If the KMT pushes passage of this act, it will have to either have to accept major concessions in the final content of the bill or face an intense backlash in civil society and public opinion.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Taiwanese women hold aloft a LGBT flag during Taiwan`s 11th annual LGBT Pride March in Taipei City Oct. 26, 2013. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

Prominent international human rights experts are calling on the Taiwan government to quickly enact a comprehensive anti-discrimination act, revamp the law on citizenship and take a wide range of other actions to curb gender discrimination.

A five-member commission issued 35 recommendations after an intense review of Taiwan’s second national report on the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

The commission members from Kenya, Malaysia the Philippines, South Korea and the United States met at the Civil Service Training Center in Taipei City June 23-26.

"It is...commendable, that a country which is not a UN member state has voluntarily undertaken to adopt the standards of CEDAW..." -- Mary Shanthi Dairiam, United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Gender Equality Taskforce
More than 230 government officials and some 100 representatives of non-governmental organizations joined in the review. The event consisted of discussions with the 55 civil society organizations, as well as a day-long questioning session with Taiwan government officials on issues raised by NGOs in nearly 30 “parallel reports.”

Zoe Ye of the Intersex, Transgender and Transsexual People Care Association, reminded the committee of the case of Tsai Ya-ting, a trans-woman whose application for a national identity card was rejected in 2002. She committed suicide the following year.

“The government has not learned from this lesson and has ignored the urgent desire of transgender persons to adopt a legal gender status in accord with their self-identity,” according to Ye.

The Taiwan government currently requires applicants for gender change to undergo psychological examinations and the surgical removal of reproductive organs before changes in official registration are approved, a requirement which Ye stressed violates five UN human rights conventions, including CEDAW.

Other NGO representatives stressed infringements on women’s land rights, faulting the government for failure to conduct gender impact-assessments for many of its development plans that involve large-scale land expropriations.

These “threaten the right to adequate housing for rural women and all aspects of their lives,” said Lu Shih-wei of Taiwan Rural Front and Wild at Heart Legal Defence Association.

Non-member committed to CEDAW

Taiwan ratified CEDAW in 2007 under the previous centrist Democratic Progressive Party government of then president Chen Shui-bian, but the United Nations Secretariat rejected the ratified treaty for deposit since Taiwan is not a UN member state.

Instead, CEDAW was directly incorporated into Taiwan’s domestic law through an “enforcement act” effective January 1, 2012.

“It is almost unique, and commendable, that a country which is not a UN member state has voluntarily undertaken to adopt the standards of CEDAW and other human rights treaties,” Mary Shanthi Dairiam, a member of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Gender Equality Taskforce, told IPS.

Still, “the defensiveness of government officials here is the same as elsewhere,” according to Shanthi, who is a former member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms Discrimination against Women (CEFDW).

Speaking to IPS, Democratic Progressive Party legislator Yu Mei-nu said that  the realization of CEDAW objectives may be hampered by “martial law mentalities” of certain government officials. But the convention has “provided a platform for citizens and civil society organizations to link with international society and fight for human rights at home,” according to Yu.

Main recommendations 

Chief among the 35 recommendations were calls to set a deadline to enact “comprehensive legislation covering all fields of gender discrimination” as soon as possible; establish an independent national human rights institution; prompt revision of laws on nationality, domestic violence, human trafficking and marriage equality; and passage of long-denied bills to protect domestic workers, along with ratification of the International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.

The committee further stressed the need for “gender impact assessments” for government policies and development plans.

It called for abolishing the surgical requirement for trans women, as well as the mandatory HIV testing requirement for entry, stay and residence of women living with HIV/AIDS.

The panel was led by Shin Heisoo, representative of the Korea Center for UN Human Rights Policy and a member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Shin previously participated in the review of CEDAW state reports from 2001 to 2008.

“I hope the government of Taiwan is contemplating how to implement these recommendations…” Shin concluded, “Especially since we have heard that there has been a deterioration of civil and political and economic human rights.”

UNDP’s Shanti echoed the need for action. “The government officials said they have revised over 33,000 laws and regulations. But what the world community wants to know is not what the state says it is doing, but what is actually being achieved in terms of real improvement in gender equality.”

Members of Taiwan’s Judicial Reform Foundation at a protest in Taipei against surveillance of citizens. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS.

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Mar 3 2014 (IPS)

Taiwan’s national legislature has taken a small but important step to curb rampant government surveillance of citizens and politicians through revisions of the Communication Security and Surveillance Act and the criminal code.

The changes were sparked by a political furore last September involving wiretaps against the speaker of the national legislature and other leading lawmakers by a secretive Special Investigation Unit (SIU) under Supreme Public Prosecutor Huang Shih-ming.“These figures show that either Taiwan is a paradise for criminals or that there is gross abuse of wiretapping."

At a high profile news conference Sep. 6, Huang had waved transcripts of wiretaps said to show that legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng had pressured justice ministry officials not to appeal a court judgement on opposition Democratic Progressive Party legislative caucus convenor Ker Chien-ming.

The supreme public prosecutor declared that the wiretaps had discovered “the greatest influence peddling scandal in history,” even though prosecutors failed to indict any lawmaker.

President Ma Ying-jeou, who is also chairman of the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT), attempted to use the flap to force Wang out of the ruling party and out of office.

However, courts granted Wang an injunction against his expulsion from the KMT and he still retains his office.

In the meantime, revelations that the SIU had tapped the legislature’s mobile phone switchboard triggered a parliamentary furore. Opposition DPP lawmakers charged that Ma was restoring the four-decade long “secret police rule” from 1949 through to the early 1990s. KMT legislator Lu Hsueh-chi said the taps were “tantamount to political spying.”

An investigative report released Jan. 15 by the Control Yuan, the ombudsman branch of Taiwan’s government, confirmed that the supreme public prosecutor had abused his powers in ordering the SIU to carry out “multiple investigations in one case”, or “fishing”, and unauthorised surveillance on lawmakers.

“The September storm triggered a backlash over the virtually uncontrolled criminal surveillance by the prosecutors, investigators and police,” Judicial Reform Foundation board member Kao Yung-cheng told IPS.

Citing Ministry of Justice figures, Kao said that prosecutors had applied for an annual average of 15,312 wiretaps between 2008-2012, 74 percent of which were approved by courts. Comparatively, wiretapping requests over the period averaged 2,720 cases annually in the United States, which has a population 11 times that of Taiwan.

“These figures show that either Taiwan is a paradise for criminals or that there is gross abuse of wiretapping and disproportionate invasions of privacy by judicial and law enforcement agencies,” said Kao.

Opposition attempts to force Huang’s resignation and disband the SIU ultimately failed, but cooperation between opposition lawmakers and KMT legislators associated with Wang, and intense pressure from legal reform and human rights organisations led to passage Jan. 15 of revisions to the Communication Security and Surveillance Act (CSSA) to restrict the use of wiretaps.

President Ma, whose disapproval rating soared to over 75 percent in the wake of the scandal, promulgated the revisions Jan. 29.

“The most important change is the requirement that prosecutors must submit separate applications for warrants for approval by courts for each person to be wiretapped instead of giving prosecutors a virtual blank cheque,” DPP legislator Yu Mei-nu, a long-time human rights and feminist lawyer told IPS.

“This change should curb unrestricted use of wiretaps to ‘fish’ for offences unrelated to the initial warrant, and help prevent the use of wiretaps for political surveillance.”

The revisions also require judges to reject applications by prosecutors for wiretaps that are not in keeping with legal procedures, lack sufficient reason and are unclear or insufficient in their explanation.

Moreover, prosecutors will not be permitted to review communication records of persons suspected of offences that carry minimum sentences of less than three years.

Approval by a judge will be required for all such applications except for some serious felonies with minimum sentences of at least 10 years, such as kidnapping, human trafficking, fraud or intimidation.

Moreover, courts will now be required to officially notify the person who is wiretapped within 14 days after the conclusion of the surveillance.

A revamped act also establishes a legal channel for appeal by victims of illegal wiretapping.

The Ministry of Justice will also be required to publicly issue an annual report of wiretapping, and report relevant data to the legislature.

Judges or prosecutors who violate the rules could face legal review or discipline, while civil service officials or employees who misuse material from wiretaps could face sentences of up to three years.

However, the reform push failed to achieve two major objectives set by human rights groups.

“The best way to prevent excessive tapping and interference with privacy is to have officers listen on site in real time and not just record and store everything for prosecutors to listen to at their leisure, but this proposal did not pass,” Kao said.

Also rejected were proposals to disband two centralised surveillance centres operated by the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau and the National Police Administration.

“These amendments do constitute a small positive step, but even bigger steps are needed to really curb wiretapping abuse,” the DPP’s Yu Mei-nu told IPS.

Chang Sen-wen, owner of a pharmacy in Dapu township demolished by Miaoli county government, speaking to protesters in August last year. His body was found under a bridge near his home a month later. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS.

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Jan 20 2014 (IPS)

The Taiwan farmers victory in a landmark court case in a years-long battle has delivered a shock to government officials and given a morale boost to citizen campaigns.

The win followed a bitter resistance campaign against expropriation of farmland that has already cost two lives.

The verdict will encourage a drive by civic groups and opposition lawmakers to revamp the controversial Land Expropriation Act.The verdict will encourage a drive by civic groups and opposition lawmakers to revamp the controversial Land Expropriation Act.

The dispute in Dapu in Miaoli county has been the most high-profile case in Taiwan of resistance to ‘zone expropriations’ in which large zones are subject to compulsory sale to government for projects which use part of the land for infrastructure and sell other portions to raise funds for construction or local government finance.

At present, there are 95 cases pending of zone expropriations involving over 7,600 hectares. Resistance campaigns are taking place over the planned expropriation of 3,000 hectares for an ‘aviation city’ near the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, for 447 hectares of designated farmland for a ‘knowledge-based industrial park’ in Hsinchu county, and for 236 hectares for a station on a mass rapid transit line between the airport and Taipei City.

“Many large-scale zone expropriations of excellent farmland have taken place all over Taiwan usually under the pretext of creating new towns or industrial zones without consideration of actual need, and the land is often sold for speculation,” said Taiwan Rural Front (TRF) chairman Hsu Shih-jung.

“The result is the rapid erosion of Taiwan’s best farmland,” said Hsu, adding that the verdict “exposed the ills of the zone expropriation system and is a benchmark for land justice.”

In 1999, Miaoli county government mayor Liu Cheng-hung ordered the zone expropriation of 156 hectares, mostly high quality rice fields, to expand a nearby technology park, even though the proposed optics factory there needed only 28 hectares. The expropriations proceeded despite cancellation of the optics project.

The case in Dapu made international news in June 2010 after a Taiwan citizen reporter filmed Miaoli county government excavators, protected by hundreds of police, destroying hectares of green rice paddies ready for harvesting.

Public revulsion over the destruction of the rice fields and the subsequent suicide of grandmother Chu Feng-min fuelled a protest campaign to ‘Return our Land’. The protest was led by the Dapu Self-Salvation Association and the TRF.

Despite negotiations with the central government and the legal proceedings, Miaoli county excavators, protected by hundreds of police, tore down the homes of the last four resisting households, including the pharmacy of Mr Chang Sen-wen, on Jul. 18 last year.

The TRF responded with a protest sit-in joined by more than 10,000 citizens. A month later Chang Sen-wen was found dead under a bridge near his home in an apparent suicide.

On Jan. 3, a panel of three Taichung High Administrative Court judges found that the compulsory purchase of land belonging to Ms Peng Hsiu-chun, Chang’s widow, and eight other citizens in four households and the Jul. 18 demolitions were “illegal” and voided the expropriation order approved by the Ministry of the Interior (MOI).

Lawyer Chan Shun-kuei, who represented the Dapu residents, told IPS that the MOI and the Miaoli county government were unlikely to win a reversal from the Taiwan Supreme Administrative Court.

“The MOI’s commissions on land expropriation and urban development and the Miaoli county government were unable to provide documentary evidence that there had been substantive discussion about the alternatives to expropriation or whether the expropriation was necessary for the public interest,” Chan said.

At a news conference held at the National Taiwan University Alumni Club in Taipei City shortly after the judgment, the TRF’s Hsu Shu-jung said the verdict “came too late to save grandmother Chu Feng-min and Chang Sen-wen.”

“We want our land and homes to be returned to us and for Liu Cheng-hung to apologise and explain why he forced my husband to die,” declared Peng Hsiu-chun, who added that she would apply for redress through the National Compensation Act.

Hsu told IPS that the late Chang Sen-wen had asked him, “What crime did I commit that the government is treating me in this way? What gives the government the right to decide whether I live or die?”

Citizen Congress Watch Board member and former convenor Ku Chung-hwa told IPS that “the controversies over Dapu and several other expropriations and the callous attitude of executive agencies have led judges to gradually finally realise the necessity to stress environmental rights.

“Civil society has won a battle and the government will need to pay at least some heed to the requirement for substantive and transparent hearings and may find it difficult to stonewall revision of the Land Expropriation Act,” Ku said.

Besides prohibiting further use of zone expropriations, draft revisions to the Land Expropriation Act submitted by opposition Democratic Progressive Party legislators on behalf of TRF and other civic organisations would mandate that the purpose of the law is to “protect the people’s right of survival and property rights,” mandate substantive assurance of public interest and necessity, and democratic and transparent public review.

Professor of land economics Tai Hsiu-hsiung of Taipei’s National Chengchi University told IPS that Taiwan’s excessively low tax rates had pushed local governments to use this method to first finance public infrastructure and then use zone expropriations get land for sale to improve their overall fiscal balance sheets.

Two marchers in Taiwan`s 11th annual LGBT Pride March in Taipei City Oct. 26 affirm that ``I am proud to be gay; I`m not a sex refugee!`` Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IP

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Oct 30 2013 (IPS)

Taiwan could become the first Asian state to legalise same-sex and other “pluralistic“ forms of marriage if a wide-ranging package of changes to the civil code are approved by the national legislature.

On Oct. 25, Taiwan`s 112-member legislature referred a “marriage equality“ bill of revisions to the Civil Code introduced by 23 lawmakers of the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party to the Judicial Affairs Committee for review and possible first reading.

Taiwan offers one of Asia`s most progressive environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights as both male and female same-sex activity are legal. But same-sex couples are deprived of legal protections encoded in the Civil Code for traditional male-female married households.

Some same-sex couples have filed appeals in administrative courts to overturn the rejection of their applications for marriage registration. But Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR) president Hsu Hsiu-wen told IPS that such legal actions “can only provide remedy for individual couples.

“What we need are lasting changes in the Civil Code to legalise same-sex marriages and civil partnerships in general,“ she said.

The current push follows two previous efforts by DPP lawmakers in 2003 and 2006 to introduce same-sex marriage bills that were blocked from the legislative agenda by the right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) majority.

During an Oct. 25 news conference at the legislature, DPP legislator Yu Mei-nu said the bill reflected both the guarantees of Taiwan`s constitution for equal rights for all citizens and the stipulations of the International Covenant on Civic and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which became part of Taiwan law in December 2009.

Yu noted that 10 international human rights experts who reviewed Taiwan`s first state report on implementation of the covenants in February had described as “discriminatory“ the fact that “only heterosexual marriages are recognised but not same-sex marriages or cohabiting partnerships“ and recommended that “the Civil Code be amended to give legal recognition to the diversity of families in the country.”

The package involves changes to 82 articles of the Civil Code section on marriage and the family, most of which involve changing phrases such as “husband and wife“ to “spouse“ or “father and mother“ to “parents.“

She said the apparently semantic changes were “substantial“ because the wording “adopts a neutral method to express the key conditions of marriage and married spouses and relations between parents and children and affirm the same-sex marriage and marriage rights for persons with diverse sexual preferences.“

The draft bill also includes complementary revisions to articles regarding adoption and inheritance that would equalise rights among spouses and ban courts from basing custody decisions on gender, sexual preference, sexual identity or gender characteristics.

In the future, Yu said that lawmakers would introduce bills on “civil partnerships“ and “family systems,“ a set of draft rules which would aim to democratise family institutions.

DPP legislator Cheng Li-chun said “the government has an obligation to fulfill the constitutional and human rights of all people and not make such fulfilment contingent on public opinion.

“There is no reason why our citizens should be deprived of the right to marry their loved one simply because their loved one has the same sex or because of different sexual preferences,“ said Cheng.

Nevertheless, prospects for early passage are clouded. There appears to be little enthusiasm in the ruling KMT for the proposed “marriage equalisation“ revisions to the Civil Code.

KMT legislative caucus deputy secretary-general Chiang Hui-chen told IPS that “this bill will pass when the time is ripe.“ She added that “the reaction I received when I asked constituents was why are we spending time on an issue like that when there is a crisis on food safety?“

Nevertheless, opposition, especially from religious groups, remains strong. A petition issued by the Taiwan Family Alliance and claiming to have over 310,000 signatures called on citizens to “support the marriage values of `one man, one woman` and `one husband, one wife“` and to “oppose the bills for `same-sex marriage` and `pluralist families’,“ maintaining that the traditional pattern was the “foundation of family ethics and moral values.“

Yu acknowledged in an interview that “there will be a long road before this bill can be approved,“ but said the decision of the full legislature to refer the bill to committee “shows significant progress“ compared to the fate of the previous attempts, which failed to enter the legislative process.

Moreover, TAPCPR`s Hsu said a poll of 567 Taiwan adults conducted by the United Daily News Survey Centre in June showed that support for same-sex marriage had risen from 25 percent in 2003 to 53 percent, while opposition fell from 55 percent to 37 percent and the ranks of “undecided“ shrank from 20 percent to 10 percent.

Hsu said opponents who believed that the reforms would “destroy the family and the institution of marriage“ were mistaken and that the passage of the revisions would “help us prevent many meaningless tragedies.“

“Our goal is to institute a marriage or partnership system in which persons of any gender or sexual preference can register and live together with appropriate legal guarantees and obligations and human rights,“ Hsu said.

“We have found in our discussions all over Taiwan that people can accept diversity through discussion and dialogue,“ she added.

“We hope that the draft revisions can be approved into law, but I also believe that their value lies in our hope that this process can open room for democratic discussion and dialogue in our society about diversity in marriage and gender roles,“ Hsu told IPS.

The draft bill was accepted by Taiwan`s legislature for review the day before the country’s 11th annual colourful LGBT Pride demonstration, which attracted over 50,000 supporters from Taiwan as well as Japan, South Korea and other countries under the themes of “make LGBT visible“ and “struggle together.“

“We want to show support for those who are still suffering or being discriminated against because of their sexual preferences and expressions,“ stated spokesman Albert Yang.

A broad coalition of Taiwanese labour, human rights and other civil society organisations are campaigning to block legislative ratification of the controversial Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement signed Jun. 21 by representatives of Taiwan and China.

The signing of the pact in Beijing, a continuation of the Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in June 2010, sparked a two-day occupation of the legislative podium by opposition Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union lawmakers.

The boycott ended only after all legislative caucuses agreed that the agreement would be reviewed line by line instead of being rammed through a ratification vote, as desired by the rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government.“But we are more concerned with the likelihood that China’s state enterprises will use their capital to buy up neighbourhood beauty parlours and hair dressing salons...” -- Cosmetology and Hair Vocational Association chairman Peter Ku Wen-fa

President and ruling KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou and other officials maintain that the new deal is in Taiwan’s favour since it would open 80 service product lines for Taiwan companies in China compared to 64 service industries in Taiwan listed for market liberalisation for investors and service providers from the Peoples Republic of China.

A post-signing impact study by the Chung-Hua Institution of Economic Research commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs released Jul. 16 forecast that the pact would lift economic growth by between 0.025-0.034 percentage points and provide over 11,000 new service sector jobs over the next decade.

Among the sectors to be opened up to Chinese investment and experts are financial services, hotels and restaurants, printing, consumer services such hairdressing and beauty parlours, wholesale commerce, transportation services, construction, telecommunications and many social services including care services for handicapped and elderly citizens.

However, a wide range of economists, labour and human rights organisations, small entrepreneurs and cultural figures together with opposition parties warn that the new pact will harm the interests of Taiwan workers and small businesses and to democratic freedoms out of proportion to its anticipated benefits.

During a rally in front of the Legislative Yuan Jul. 28, Cross-Strait Agreement Watch Alliance Convenor Lai Chung-chiang announced the official formation of the Democratic Front against the Black-Box Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement composed of a coalition of labour, human rights, environmental, social welfare and media reform organisations.

Critics have concentrated their fire on the lack of transparency in the negotiations, the asymmetrical liberalisations to China’s benefit and the impact on Taiwan society, culture and national security of deeper links with China’s party-state dominated economy.

The government did not conduct any comprehensive impact assessment or hold any substantive dialogue with industry associations, labour unions or legislators before signing this pact, Taiwan Labour Front secretary-general Sun Yu-lien told IPS.

National Taiwan University department of economics chairwoman Prof. Cheng Hsiu-lien told IPS that most of the market liberalisations offered by China have preconditions while most Taiwan’s market openings for Chinese companies are unconditional.

Cheng noted that Taiwan e-commerce ventures will not be allowed to directly offer cross-border services, but will have to set up joint ventures in China’s Fujian Province and apply for licences which would ban content contrary to Chinese policies, such as Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory.

Taiwanese e-commerce enterprises will be forced to take their capital, staff and knowhow to China and will also be forced to engage in self-censorship, warned Cheng.

Hong Yi Travel Services co-chairman Jack Tsai Chia-huang told IPS that the new pact would let Chinese companies set up a vertically integrated system of travel agencies, hotels, transportation, restaurants and retail stores that would monopolise the cash flow from Chinese tourism and let the Taiwan people bear the costs to the environment.

Cosmetology and Hair Vocational Association chairman Peter Ku Wen-fa told IPS that officials affirm that Chinese workers will not be imported and so they will have to worry about their jobs.

“But we are more concerned with the likelihood that China’s state enterprises will use their capital to buy up neighbourhood beauty parlours and hair dressing salons and our beauticians or hair stylists will become employees in Chinese state enterprises.”

Even businessmen eager to expand into the China market were dismayed.

Locus Publishing Company chairman Rex Hau Ming-yi said in a news conference Jul. 27 that government negotiators had failed to press Beijing to allow Taiwan publishers and printers access to book and magazine publishing licences, but agreed to permit Chinese state-owned publishing groups invest in Taiwan’s printing and wholesale market.

Taiwan publishers will be squeezed if Chinese state companies gain control over printing and wholesaling and will be subject to self-censorship, said Hou, who added that the result would be the erosion of freedom of thought and cultural diversity in our own civil society.

National Taiwan University professor of economics Lin Shang-kai told IPS that the new pact will spark another wave of migration of capital, talent and knowhow to China and thus further push down investment, employment, wages and consumption in our own economy.

A survey of 1,008 Taiwan adults released in late July by Taiwan Indicators Survey Research found that 48 percent opposed signing the services trade pact, while 34 percent were in favour. These figures reflect a reversal three years ago, when 47 percent supported signing an ECFA compared to 32 percent who opposed.

The impact of the backlash was shown when Taiwan’s 113-member national legislature began a two-week special session Jul. 29 during which the KMT had initially aimed to secure ratification of the pact.

Instead, while the civic alliance held protests against the pact outside the Legislative Yuan complex, party caucuses agreed to submit the pact to review by a legislative committee in September.

Taiwan Democratic Watch president Hsu Wei-chun told IPS that the delay shows that citizen pressure can have impact as many KMT lawmakers are aware that citizens on the streets and voters in their districts are very worried.

The just-completed review of Taiwan’s initial state human rights report offers a new model featuring direct involvement by civil society organisations in examining compliance with international rights covenants.

From Feb. 25 through Mar. 1 in Taipei City, a group of 10 independent international experts reviewed Taiwan’s initial human rights report under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) that Taiwan’s national legislature approved and President Ma Ying-jeou ratified in March 2009.

Since Taiwan has been excluded from the United Nations since October 1971, the ratified treaties could not be deposited with the UN Secretariat, but were directly incorporated into Taiwan domestic law through an ‘implementation act’ which took effect Dec. 10, 2009.

In line with the Implementation Act, the government of Taiwan’s ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) conducted a review of the legal code for compliance with the covenants and drafted the country’s first official state human rights report, which was published in April 2012.

Since Taiwan could not submit the report for review by the two UN human rights commissions responsible for monitoring implementation of the ICCPR and ICESCR, the official Presidential Human Rights Advisory Council (PHRAC) accepted a proposal of civil society organisations and invited 10 prominent international human rights experts to review the government’s State Report.

Manfred Nowak, professor of law and human rights at the University of Vienna and former UN special rapporteur on torture, led the review of the ICCPR. Eibe Riedel, chairman of the board of trustees of the German Institute for Human Rights and former vice-chair of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, headed the five-person subgroup for the ICESCR.

In the months leading up to the review, the PHRAC and the Ministry of Justice, which acted as secretariat for the review, translated into English the initial State Report and responses to “lists of issues” filed by the 10 international experts on the ICCPR and the ICESCR.

During the same period, Covenants Watch, a coalition of NGOs concerned with monitoring the treaties, drafted a ‘parallel report’ in May 2012, translated an updated parallel report into English in November 2012 and coordinated alternative replies to the list of issues by Taiwanese NGOs submitted to the experts Feb. 22.

After arriving in Taipei Feb. 24, the 10 experts held three days of discussions with government agencies, often represented at the vice-ministerial level, and met separately with NGOs in both formal and informal sessions before taking a day to write their conclusions Feb. 28. They issued their “conclusions and recommendations” at a news conference held at the Ministry of Justice Mar. 1.

Following the review, Nowak said the panel had been impressed by the detail of government responses and had been “deeply impressed” by the vitality of Taiwan’s civil society organisations.

Speaking at the Mar. 1 news conference, Nowak said it was “unique that a non-UN member has been willing to ratify and accept the two most important international human rights treaties, incorporate them into domestic law and accept review by independent international experts.”

Theo van Boven, honorary professor of international law at the University of Maastricht and former UN rapporteur on torture, who was one of the 10 experts, told IPS that “the aspect of the process in Taiwan of being able to face reality and meet many persons directly has an extra and worthwhile dimension and we wonder whether this can become a model for monitoring exercises in other countries.”

Speaking at a news conference held by NGOs Mar. 2, Covenants Watch convenor Kao Yung-cheng stated that “without the information provided by NGOs, the experts would have had difficulty finding out the realities of Taiwan’s human rights situation, and the review would have degenerated into a mere public relations exercise.”

Speaking at the same event, Huang Song-lih, professor of public health at Taipei’s National Yang Ming University and a member of a seven-person coordination committee under the PHRAC added that “one special aspect about this review is the fact that our voices have been heard by international experts during the past week more than we have been listened to by the government over the past five years.”

“UN reviews of such covenants are conducted in either Geneva or New York with a handful of government officials of the country under review and no formal sessions with NGOs, who have to engage in ‘guerrilla lobbying’ to be heard,” Danthong Breen, a human rights defender with Thailand’s Union for Civil Liberty (UCL) told IPS.

On Mar. 1, Nowak and Riedel announced more than 40 concrete recommendations, including calls for the Taiwan government to quickly set up “an independent national human rights commission,” ratify the other core UN human rights covenants, intensify training regarding the application of the covenants for judges, prosecutors, police and prison administrators, restore a moratorium on the implementation of death sentences, review the controversial Urban Renewal Act and stop forced evictions unless alternative housing is provided.”

The international experts noted that “as a result of the Implementation Act, the provisions of the two covenants are part of Taiwanese law and prevail over inconsistent domestic laws other than the Constitution.”

Amnesty International East Asia director Rosann Rife later told IPS that “the most important point confirmed by the government is that the position of the two covenants is higher than domestic law except only for the Constitution and therefore that when contradictions exist between domestic law and the covenants, the latter should take precedence.”

Saying that the most serious problem was Taiwan’s continued use of the death penalty, Nowak declared that the experts “strongly recommend that the government of Taiwan intensify efforts towards abolition of capital punishment and as a first and decisive step immediately introduce a moratorium on executions in accordance with the recommendations of the UN General Assembly.”

The experts also concluded that the provision of Article 6 (4) of the ICCPR that anyone sentenced to death has the right to seek pardon or commutation “seems to have been violated in all 15 cases of executions carried out in Taiwan during the past three years.”

Covenants Watch Convenor Kao Yung-cheng speaks to reporters in Taipei City on Dec. 27, 2012. Protestors’ posters read “Illegal Murders Are Not Justice”. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

Taiwanese activists and human rights advocates ushered in the New Year with a push to prevent a return to authoritarianism and defend procedural justice for death row prisoners in the wake of six executions just before Christmas.

Rights lawyers say they “do not exclude” filing criminal charges against Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu in addition to filing a petition calling for his impeachment for “illegally” ordering the execution of six death row convicts who had been handed death sentences, confirmed by the Taiwan Supreme Court, for a total of eight murders.

The men were executed on Dec. 21 by pistol shots to the head and heart in three prisons across Taiwan, without prior notification to families or lawyers.

The incident brought the total number of persons executed by the current government to 19. President Ma Ying-jeou of the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) broke a five-year moratorium on death penalty executions, begun by the previous Democratic Progressive Party administration, with four executions on Apr. 30, 2010.

A total of 55 convicts remain on death row.

The executions were the third set carried out since the Taiwan government ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in March 2009 and incorporated the content of the two treaties into domestic law through an implementation act effective December 10, 2009 .

The European Union and international and domestic human rights groups denounced the executions.

European Commission Vice President Catherine Ashton deplored the executions and called on Taipei to take concrete steps toward reducing the use of capital punishment to allow the resumption of a de facto moratorium.

Amnesty International East Asia Director Roseann Rife termed the action cold-blooded killing by the Taiwan authorities.

The KMT government’s decision to carry out the executions overrode an appeal by a panel of prominent international human rights professionals slated to review Taiwan’s compliance with the two covenants in late February 2013.

Manfred Nowak, former United Nations special rapporteur on torture, and Eibe Riedel, joint expert committee member of the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, issued a joint letter on Nov. 21 last year calling on Ma to refrain from carrying out any more executions before the February review.

According to Tseng, the ministry of justice (MOJ) had no choice but to carry out the executions after the prime suspect in a child murder sparked public outrage by claiming he knew he would not be executed and could enjoy a life in prison.

Tseng also declared that the MOJ has never promised to terminate the death penalty.

Shortly after the incident, a coalition of Taiwan human rights organisations submitted an impeachment motion against Tseng to the Control Yuan, the branch of government responsible for monitoring malfeasance by government officials.

The petition, filed in person with Control Yuan Commissioner Yeh Yao-peng by Covenants Watch convenor Kao Yung-cheng, charged that Tseng’s signature on the execution orders on Dec. 20 violated Article 6-4 of the ICCPR, which has been ratified by this country and given effect in domestic law by the Implementation Act.

The petition added that the ICCPR article mandates that “anyone sentenced to death shall have the right to seek pardon or commutation of the sentence”.

Kao related that the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) had helped 44 death row convicts, including the six executed December 21, to submit formal petitions for amnesty, pardon or commutation of sentence to President Ma on Mar. 29, 2010.

The president gave no indication that he approved or rejected the petitions, Kao told IPS.

In its Dec. 21 statement, the MOJ said the executions had been carried out in accordance with existing law, including the Amnesty Act, which does not specify a procedure for petitions.

However, Kao told IPS that the Implementation Act grants the covenants “priority application” over other laws, a principle reaffirmed by Ma himself in a Dec. 18 news conference.

Therefore, Tseng was legally required to respect the right of petition for amnesty by “first certifying that the president had already rejected appeals for amnesty before carrying out” the executions, Kao said.

The petition concluded that the justice minister committed a grave violation of law and abuse of authority and asked the Control Yuan to impeach Tseng.

Kao told IPS that the impeachment petition is distinct from the question of abolition but instead concerns procedural justice.

If people can be executed, regardless of the reasons, without authorities fulfilling the required legal process, Taiwan will be put back on the road to authoritarianism, Kao warned.

He also told IPS that human rights groups are discussing filing criminal charges against Tseng, who could be liable for punishment under Article 127 of the Criminal Code with up to five years’ imprisonment.

Ironically, while the MOJ claims that public polls showed an overwhelming majority in favour of the death penalty, most citizens lack confidence in the judicial process itself.

A poll of 1,073 adults conducted by the Taiwan Thinktank in mid December showed that 64.4 percent believed the judiciary had been “unfair” in its judgements during 2012, compared with just 21.4 percent who believed the justice system was “fair”.

Activists also warned that the executions could further undermine the quality of the judicial process.

Academica Institution for Jurispurdence Deputy Research Fellow Liao Fu-teh told IPS that “the death penalty may be being used as a tool of intimidation”.

Liao cited media reports on Dec. 23, 2012, which related that a suspect being detained for questioning in Hualien in eastern Taiwan in connection with the murder of her mother had been “frightened” by the executions and, after months of denials, confessed to committing the killing with her boyfriend, to avoid being executed.

Criticism of the apparent lack of official respect for the two covenants intensified during 2012.

On Dec. 10 last year, a coalition of civil society, labour, environmental and social movement organisations awarded Ma a paper plaque for “stomping on human rights” just as Ma was presenting an “Asian Democracy and Human Rights Award” to the Thailand-based ECPAT International in Taipei’s Far East Plaza Hotel.

(END)

Taiwan civic reform, journalist and labour organisations have mobilised against the acquisition of the large Next Media (Taiwan) group by tycoons linked with China. They say this threatens Taiwan’s news freedom and even the survival of its democratic political system.

The Next Media Group owned by Hong Kong-based garment and media owner Jimmy Lai signed a contract in Macao Nov. 29 to sell four media operations of Next Media (Taiwan) for 600 million dollars to five investors, including Want Want China Times group president Tsai Shao-chung (son of controversial Want Want tycoon Tsai Eng-ming), Formosa Plastics Group chairman William Wong and Chinatrust Charity Foundation chairman Jeffrey Koo, Jr.

Taiwan media reported in mid-October that Next Media Group chairman Jimmy Lai planned to sell his Taiwan print and television outlets, namely the profitable Chinese-language Apple Daily, Sharp Daily, Next Weekly and the Next TV cable network to Koo, Wong and unnamed investors in the wake of losing substantial funds in his cable TV venture due to regulatory delays and difficulty in getting the channels onto operating systems.

However, concern over the proposed sale’s impact on Taiwan’s media pluralism, news freedom and democratic politics soared after a leading business biweekly, Wealth Magazine, reported in early November that Tsai may be behind the takeover.

Tsai, who is a major investor in Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing Asia Television, purchased the China Times, the terrestrial China Television (CTV) and CTI-TV cable television network in November 2008 and later purchased the China Systems Network, Taiwan’s largest cable TV service distributor in a deal approved by the National Communications Commission Jul. 25 this year. This was despite bitter opposition by media reform and civic organisations and ‘full court press’ assaults on critics including journalists, scholars and opposition lawmakers by Tsai`s media outlets.

Taiwan Democracy Monitor president Karl Hsu Wei-chun told IPS that the takeover by Next Media (Taiwan) by the five conglomerate tycoons who have major business stakes in the People’s Republic of China “will have a grave structural impact on Taiwan’s democracy.

“Anyone who has eyes can see that this is the method through which China is buying control over Taiwan, just as in Hong Kong in the 1990s,” said TDW’s Hsu.

Concern over the expansion of Tsai’s media empire was already manifested on Sep. 1 when nearly 10,000 journalists, students and NGO activists led by the Association of Taiwan Journalists (ATJ) participated in a ‘March Against Media Monopoly’ in Taipei City.

The imminent takeover of the Next Media (Taiwan) outlets, especially Apple Daily and Next Magazine, has reignited anxiety over freedom of expression, given the performance of Apple Daily.

Founded in 2001 by Lai after the success of Apple Daily and Next Weekly in Hong Kong, Apple Daily, known for a sensationalist and muck-raking style, has become one of top two national newspapers in Taiwan, neck and neck with the ‘Taiwan-centric’ Liberty Times. Both now have far more readership than the former market-leading conservative United Daily News or the China Times.

In the wake of Lai’s decision, student groups, including a ‘Youth Alliance Against Media Monsters’ held an overnight sit-in at the Cabinet building Nov. 27 and clashed occasionally with police. Labour unions, which had quickly organised in the four main Next Media units, held a vigil outside Next Media headquarters on the evening of Nov. 27.

The KMT government of President Ma Ying-jeou has remained largely silent, with Premier Sean Chen stating on Nov. 28 that his government “will respect the judgment” of several independent regulatory commissions on fair trade, finance and communications.

During a public hearing at the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) Nov. 29, scholars, journalists, economists and consumer rights representatives unanimously urged the FTC to veto or at least suspend approval until the national legislature enacts robust legislation to regulate media monopolisation.

ATJ President Chen Siao-yi stressed that Taiwan’s four national newspapers retain decisive “agenda setting” influence as television and radio news media and internet media get their news almost entirely from the four national dailies.

“If these tycoons gain control over 50 percent of Taiwan’s media, we will never know how much news will be lost and not published and how much of what is published is false,” Chen warned.

“Tsai Eng-meng’s WWCT Group will become a vertically and horizontally integrated hegemon if the purchase of Next Media is approved,” National Taiwan University economics department chairwoman Cheng Hsiu-ling told the FTC hearing.

Cheng estimated that Tsai would gain control of over 50 percent of the national newspaper market, 30 percent of the cable TV market and 19 percent of the wireless TV market, and warned this combination “will result in the concentration of advertising and circulation, and force the other two national newspapers out of the market.”

“We will be left with only one giant upstream source of ‘news’,” the NTU economist told IPS.

FTC Commissioner Sun Li-chun has promised that his commission would proceed with its review in a “transparent” manner. (End)

The end of Taiwan’s most controversial death penalty case this week has “punctured the myth that the judicial system never makes mistakes in death penalty cases,” Judicial Reform Foundation (JRF) executive director Lin Feng-cheng told IPS.

A panel of three High Court judges overturned murder convictions and capital sentences Aug. 31 against the so-called ‘Hsichih Trio’ after 21 years of legal battles. Supporters of human rights and opponents of the death penalty gathered at the Taiwan High Court Criminal Appeals building cheered after Su You-chen, chairman of the Chinese Association for Human Rights, announced the  “not guilty” verdicts for Su Chien-ho, Chuang Lin-hsun and Liu Bin-lang.

The case began on Mar. 23, 1991 when a couple, Wu Ming-han and his wife Yeh Ying-lan, living in Hsichih township near Taipei City were found robbed and murdered, having been stabbed 79 times.

On Aug. 13 1991, Wang Wen-hsiao, a neighbour then serving in Taiwan’s Marines, was detained and then formally arrested two days later, based on a fingerprint found at the murder scene.

Wang initially confessed to have conducted the killings alone, but police doubted that Wang could have killed the couple by himself.

During interrogations by Hsichih precinct police, Wang named three other 19-year-old associates, Su Chien-ho, Chuang Lin-hsun and Liu Bin-lang for helping him murder the couple after robbing their home and raping Yeh.

The three suspects confessed to the crimes to the police and were charged with murder under the Act for the Control and Punishment of Banditry at the time, which provided for mandatory death sentences.

Wang was convicted in military court and executed on Jan. 11, 1992 and never directly faced Su and the other two suspects.

After judges refused to accept their claims to have made false confessions under torture, Su, Liu and Chuang were convicted in the Shihlin district court on Feb. 18, 1992 and lost two appeals to the High Court before the Supreme Court finalised their guilty verdicts and imposed death sentences on Feb. 9, 1995.

Although they would normally have been executed within three days, then justice minister (and now president and ruling Chinese Nationalist Party chairman) Ma Ying-jeou refused to sign the execution orders, returning the case to the Supreme Court due to the lack of direct evidence.

The Control Yuan, Taiwan’s watchdog branch of government, launched a probe into the Su Chien-ho case in March 1995 that found numerous errors in the investigation and trial proceedings by the Hsichih police bureau, the Shihlin district court and the High Court.

The “Hsichih Trio” or “Su Chien-ho” case became the focus of a major global human rights campaign, and spurred the drive by Taiwan civil society groups to push for the abolition of the death penalty.

A turning point came in June 2008 when renowned criminologist Henry Lee Chang-yi undertook a detailed investigation of the crime scene and forensic data on behalf of the defendants and concluded that “it is extremely likely that this case was committed by Wang Wen-hsiao alone.”

“This critical forensic research came about because of civil society efforts and not the court,” Judicial Reform Foundation executive director Lin Feng-cheng told IPS. “It was only because this case attracted too much attention and even became the subject of an international campaign were we able to persuade Henry Lee to come here.”

Speaking for the trio, Su Chien-ho said “21 years of trials and retrials has turned us into middle-aged men and our youth is long gone, but we now only have feelings of gratitude and hope to return to normal lives.”

“Senior judicial officials continue to attempt to persuade society that the judicial system never makes mistakes and this myth has blinded many people, but the Su Chien-ho case is an example of a finalized death penalty verdict that was overturned and shown to be wrong,” the JRF spokesman told IPS.

“If their death penalty verdicts had been implemented, they would have been executed just like Chiang Kuo-ching” – an Air Force private wrongfully executed in August 1997 after confessing under torture to a rape-murder, said Lin. “This fact shows how frightening the death penalty truly is.”

President Ma, who as president has overseen the ending of a nearly five-year moratorium on the death penalty with nine executions, told reporters Aug. 31 that he hoped that there would never again be such a case and that there would no longer be cases in which confessions were obtained through improper means from suspects.

Human rights activists warn that Taiwan government prosecutors have sent a message that torture is permissible by refusing to indict a former defence minister and eight other former military officers behind the wrongful execution of a young Air Force private by torturing him into confessing rape and murder.

A young girl was found dead after being raped in the Taiwan Air Force headquarters complex in Taipei in September 1996.

A month later, 20-year-old Air Force private Chiang Kuo-ching was indicted by military prosecutors for the rape-murder. After being convicted by a military tribunal even though he recanted his confession, he was executed by a shot to his head on Aug. 13, 1997.

Chiang’s case became a benchmark human rights issue through a decade-long campaign by his father Chiang Chih-an and his mother Wang Tsai-lien to clear his name. They insisted that Chiang was innocent, and had been tortured into making a false confession.

In May 2010 Control Yuan, Taiwan’s official watchdog, ordered reopening of the case. This led to a re-investigation by the Special Investigation Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutors Office early last year. A military re-trial exonerated the late Air Force private in September last year.

Hsu Jung-chou, 35, who had also served in the AOC, was convicted last December of the crime and given an 18-year sentence.

The military court acknowledged that Chiang’s ‘confession’, the prime basis for his conviction by the military tribunal, had been extracted under torture by officers under then Air Force Combat Operations Command (AOC) commander  Chen Chao-min, who was later defence minister from May 2008 to September 2009.

For the first time in Taiwan history, the SID investigation and the military court had identified the perpetrators as well as the victims in a case of state torture. But in May 2011, Taipei District Court prosecutors refrained from indicting any of the implicated former officers on the grounds that the 10-year statute of limitation for offences of “coercion” and “intimidation and endangerment” had expired. The offences carry a maximum punishment of less than three years imprisonment.

After being ordered by the Taiwan High Court Prosecutors Office to re-investigate the case, the Taipei District Court Prosecutors Office again refused Aug. 24 to issue any indictments. It rejected calls by lawyers for the Chiang family that Chao and the other officers should be indicated for murder or for “causing death through abuse of the power of prosecution.”

Taipei District Prosecutor Office spokesman Huang Tieh-hsin said on Aug. 24 that Chen Chao-min and the others could not be indicted for murder even though they had used electric cattle prods to beat and torture Chiang to confess because they aimed to “gain merit by solving the case” and did not deliberately intend to cause Chiang’s wrongful death.

“Since there was no cause and effect relationship, we have decided not to issue any indictment,” Huang stated.

Lawyer Greg Yo Po-hsiang told IPS that Chiang’s mother Wang Tsai-lien, who had earlier said that her son’s exoneration would be “meaningless” unless his torturers were brought to justice, was “furious” when informed of the new finding.

“Since these reasons fly in the face of common sense, her anger is understandable,” said Yo, who is also an executive director of the Taipei Bar Association.

“Chao and the other officers were fully aware that conviction of rape-murder would carry a mandatory death penalty under military law and that therefore it was a virtual certainty that a confession would result in Chiang’s execution,” Yo told IPS.

Yo said the claim that Chen Chao-min and the other officers could not have known that forcing Chiang to confess would result in his death “might have a shred of credibility if there had been any precedents in which persons convicted by military courts of crimes carrying mandatory death sentences had not actually been executed.

“I have not heard of even one such case,” said Yo. Neither Ms Wang nor any of her legal team were asked for their views during the investigation, Yo said.

Lawyers representing Chiang’s mother will now file a motion for “reconsideration”, Yo said, after receiving the official notification of the Taipei District Prosecutor Office’s decision.

Taiwan Alliance Against the Death Penalty executive director Lin Hsin-yi told IPS that the decision not to indict “sends a chilling message that the Taiwan judicial system believes that there is nothing wrong with torture” and shows that “victims of torture will never receive justice and that the persons who tortured them will never need to bear responsibility.”

Lin said there are several death row inmates who have been victims of torture, notably Chiou Ho-shun, now in his 50s, who was arrested in 1989 on suspicion of the kidnap and murder of nine-year old boy and a female insurance agent. He was sentenced to death based almost entirely on confessions obtained in police interrogations.

Despite appeals by Amnesty International, Chiou’s conviction and death sentence were finalised in July 2011 by the Taiwan Supreme Court even though an investigation by Control Yuan in 1994 had found that the investigating police had tortured Chiou and other defendants during their interrogations.

Covenants Watch executive director Kao Yung-cheng told IPS that the decision also cast serious doubt on the willingness and capability of the Taiwan government to implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it ratified and incorporated into domestic law effective December 2009.

Kao, a former prosecutor, told IPS that the ICCPR’s Article 2 requires states which ratify the covenant to ensure that persons who have their rights violated have effective remedies, and to enforce those remedies.

“The most important responsibility of the State is to find and expose the truth and the prosecutors have refused to face this obligation,” Kao told IPS.

Environmental and community activists from Taiwan will enliven the United Nations Sustainable Development Conference, dubbed Rio+20, and the parallel People’s Summit, with one of the island’s most prominent social protest music groups, the Village Armed Youth Band.

Even though Taiwan’s 23 million people have not been represented in the U.N. since October 1971, several delegations will attend the Rio+20 conference and its side events, including a group of government officials led by Environmental Protection Administration Vice Minister, Yeh Hsin-cheng; environmental officials from the island nation’s five special municipalities; and a civic Taiwan Action NGO (TANGO) delegation.

Led by Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU) President Wang Chun-hsiu, who attended both the fist earth summit in Rio back in 1992 and the 2002 Johannesburg meetings, the 18-person TANGO delegation includes activists from the Homeworkers United Foundation, the Green Citizens’ Action Alliance Taiwan, the Community Empowering Society, the Taiwan Environmental Info Association, the Society of Wilderness and four youth delegates from the Taiwan Youth Climate Coalition.

On Sunday, the TANGO delegation held an event entitled, ‘From Energy Democrazy to Energy Democracy: Taiwan’s PPP (People’s Power Plant Movement) and Green Collar Taiwan.’

They also plan to hold two protest marches in Rio.

Wang said the TANGO delegation would enliven its activities with performances by the radical Taiwan folk-rock group, the Village Armed Youth Band, thereby introducing to People’s Summit participants the generally unappreciated richness of Taiwan’s social protest music.

Based in central Taiwan’s Taichung City, the three-person band has emerged as a potent grassroots voice for Taiwan’s anti-nuclear power movement and numerous other environmental causes as well as struggles by farmers to resist expropriation of their land by central and local governments for industrial development plans.

Village Armed Youth Band guitarist and vocalist Chiang Yu-da, usually known as “Ah Da”, composed a new song, ‘Formosa Etude’, specifically for the Rio+20 meet, which begins with the words, “Formosa, I have written a mother’s poem for you…will you not listen to my singing?”

“Taiwan should not just be seen, but also heard,” said Chiang, whose group features an almost entirely acoustic sound with Siao Chang-jhan (“Ah-Chan”) on djembe drums and Wei Hong-yang (“Lichun”) on violin.

“Most of our songs are concerned with the degradation of Taiwan’s agriculture and rural and land justice,” said Chiang, who stated that the five-year-old band took its inspiration from Taiwanese “rice bomber” and activist Yang Ju-men, who planted 17 small explosives made mainly of rice in the early 2000s to protest Taiwan’s entry into the World Trade Organisation and push the government to protect the interests of farmers.

“I brought that attitude of being armed into our music, whose ideals are the same as those which Yang Ju-men expressed with his bombs,” said Chiang, a graduate of the philosophy department at Tunghai University in Taichung.

A notable example of this theme was Chiang’s ‘The Song of the White Dolphin’, which protested the threat posed to the critically endangered marine mammal (also known as the Taiwan Pink Dolphin) by the government’s plans to build a major Kuokuang Petrochemical Project on Taiwan’s central west coast, on “reclaimed” land in the Dacheng Wetlands that are the white dolphin’s last habitat in the country.

The song, whose simple lyrics comprise a lament by the white dolphin that “cannot find its mother”, helped fuel a nationwide civic movement in which over 30,000 citizens offered to contribute to a proposed fund to buy 200 hectares of wetlands as a reserve for the dolphins.

The ‘Save the Taiwan Pink Dolphin’ movement gave national and international prominence to the decade-long campaign by local farmers and environmentalists to block the massive project led by the state-owned CPC Corporation and other petrochemical firms and played a major role in the announcement by President and ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou on Apr. 22, 2011 that the complex “will not be built in Changhua County.”

Besides performing in numerous protest rallies, on university campuses and at NGO meetings around Taiwan, the Village Armed Youth has issued two VCDs, the first in 2009 and the second, ‘Return Our Lands’, a year later, while ‘The Song of the White Dolphin’ was included in a collection called ‘Petrochemical Nation’ issued by the Changhua County Environmental Protection Union in 2011.

‘Return Our Land’, which has also been produced as a seven-minute MTV video, was written and performed in support of the ongoing struggle of residents of Siangsihliao village against expropriation of their land for an expansion project of the Taichung Technological Zone.

Chiang said the group would perform mainly environmental and land justice songs in Rio. These may include ‘No Justice, No Peace’, ‘I Don`t Want to Work the Farm Anymore’ and ‘The Devil’s Gift’, a protest song about the government’s continued push to develop nuclear power.

Relating that he translated the band’s songs into English with photographs illustrating their backgrounds, Chiang told IPS, “I hope through our music we can have dialogue with people from other countries and explain Taiwan’s experiences, what is happening now in Taiwan and what the Taiwan people are doing about it.”

(END)

Earlier this week a coalition of rights organisations issued a ‘shadow report’ on Taiwan’s compliance with two international human rights covenants, which it incorporated into domestic law in 2009, probing the country’s track record on human rights.

Liao Fu-teh, associate research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Law, who edited the shadow report, said, “The government itself thinks it is in fine health, but from the standpoint of civil society we find that its body may have high blood pressure and even some worrisome tumours.”

The ‘Taiwan Human Rights Report 2011: Shadow Reports on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) from NGOs’ published by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and Covenants Watch, a coalition of over 60 civil organisations, was formally released on May 22.

“We probably set a record in responding to a national human rights report with a shadow report within one month,” said Covenant Watch Convenor Kao Yung-cheng.

The official report was released Apr. 20, by President and ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou, just over three years after Taiwan’s national legislature ratified the ICCPR and ICESCR and enacted an “implementation law” for their domestic application, effective Dec. 10, 2009.

Liao said the official report failed to incorporate the numerous “general comments” drafted by the United Nations Human Rights Commission for the ICCPR and by the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for the ICESCR, which provide concrete interpretations of the content of human rights provisions on major thematic issues.

“The government thus is unable to have a complete understanding of how these covenants are supposed to be applied to many substantive issues,” Liao added, noting that the Taiwan government has yet to even publish a full Chinese-language edition of the general comments for use by government agencies.

Kao said the civil shadow report responded to numerous shortcomings in the KMT government’s official report, raised human rights issues not mentioned in the government’s review and offered specific recommendations for improvement on each article.

With regard to the ICCPR, the shadow report reviewed the KMT government’s human rights performance in the fields of: the right to self-determination, the right to life, prohibition of torture, prohibition of human slavery, personal freedom, the rights of liberty of movement and residence, the right to privacy, the rights of freedom of expression and news freedom, the rights of assembly and association, the rights of children, the right of political participation and the rights of minority peoples.

With regard to the ICESCR, the shadow report dealt with human rights problems in the fields of: the rights of work, working conditions and labour rights, the right to a suitable standard of living, the right to health and the right to receive education and the need to address various types of discrimination.

With regard to the right to self-determination, enshrined in the first article of both covenants, the shadow report related that the government had failed to grant equal treatment for Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, that the KMT government had even violated many if not most of the articles of the ‘Indigenous Peoples Basic Law’ and that a draft bill introduced by the KMT for indigenous peoples self-government would actually abrogate the land rights of indigenous peoples.

Moreover, the shadow report noted that the stiff 50 percent voter turnout quorum and the vetting of referendum topics by a referendum review committee in January 2004 had “added difficultly on to difficulty for the exercise by people of the right to direct democracy.”

Such rules have effectively stymied citizen efforts to use referendums to resolve major public policy controversies – such as whether to continue construction of a fourth nuclear power plant – and have blocked efforts by the Dawu indigenous people on Orchid Island (Lanyu) to secure the removal of a low- level radioactive waste storage facility established without permission of the residents.

With regard to the right to life in Article Six, the report urged the government to respect the U.N. “Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of those Facing the Death Penalty,” including by prohibiting the execution of psychologically or mentally impaired convicts; establish a clear and complete procedure for appeals for clemency; and review whether current procedures and standards for determining death sentences are in keeping with the ICCPR.

Citing capital punishment cases in which convictions and sentences were based on confessions extracted using torture, the shadow report reminded the government that States bound by the ICCPR are obliged to prohibit mistreatment or torture of suspects, provide channels for appeal and reparations for torture victims and improve the provision of medical care for convicts or other persons under detention.

The shadow report also stated that Taiwan’s attempts to prevent human trafficking were “full of problems”, including grossly inadequate shelter facilities and interpretation and protection services for victims and insufficient training of staff in related labour affairs and judicial agencies.

With regard to the right of liberty and security ensured by Article 9 of the ICCPR, the shadow report called on the government to expunge current rules that permit extended (and in some cases indefinite) detention for persons suspected of “serious crimes”.

The shadow report devoted considerable space to Article 19 of the ICCPR and noted that the government document “did not seriously address the problems encountered in Taiwan regarding freedom of expression and news freedom.”

“Although Taiwan is disadvantaged by being isolated from the U.N. system, we have an opportunity to show some leadership in innovation and obtain a deeper and more profound review of our human rights situation than can be done by the overburdened UNHRC,” said Peter Huang Wen-hsiung, former president of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.

Huang stated that a seven-person committee of civil organisation representatives and members of the presidential human rights advisory commission has been formed to map out procedures for the review and to choose a panel of prominent human rights specialists to review Taiwan’s national report and submissions of shadow and alternative NGO reports.

(END)

Reporters say journalism is "not more fun" in the Philippines. Credit: Keith Bacongco/CC-BY-2.0

By Dennis Engbarth
MANILA, May 10 2012 (IPS)

Reporters working in the Philippines, the world’s third most dangerous nation for journalists, are having difficulty identifying with the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” tourism promotion campaign launched by the Liberal Party-led government of President Benigno Aquino III.

The Southeast Asian nation’s reputation for press freedom and safety has yet to recover from the notorious Ampatuan Massacre of Nov. 23, 2009 in Maguindanao, Mindanao, in which 58 persons, including 32 reporters, were slaughtered by the private army of a local political clan chief, Andal Ampatuan Sr.

A total of 196 persons have been charged in the massacre, including clan patriarch Andal and his grandson, Anwar Ampatuan Jr, but less than 100 have been arrested and not a single one convicted of any crimes.

While the government attempts to paint over the tragedy with billboards proclaiming the joys of holidaying in the Philippines, media workers are continuing the fight for accountability.

A formal statement issued by the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) to mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3 declared, “There is little reason for celebration since not a single mastermind in any of the 152 murders of journalists since 1986 has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted.”

Most of these killings occurred during the nine years of rule from 2001 to 2010 under former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who is now in detention on charges of electoral sabotage, but at least 12 have occurred in the past two years under the Aquino administration.

“Murders of media workers, just like all other extrajudicial killings, are a matter of State accountability,” declared the NUJP. “If the Philippine press remains free despite all the threats against it, it is not because of the government but because the press insists on being free.”

Nevertheless, the presidential office in the Malacañang Palace publically marked the country’s improved ranking in the annual Freedom of the Press index, published by the Washington-based human rights advocacy group Freedom House on May 1.

The index cited a reduction in violence against journalists, attempts by the government to address impunity and expanded diversity in media ownership among its reasons for the improved rating.

Communications Development Secretary Ramon Carandang acknowledged on May 2 that “more needs to be done”, but stated that the improved ranking had recognised the Philippine government’s attempts to strengthen press freedom.

On the following day, presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda vowed that the Aquino administration would not tolerate extralegal killings, especially attacks on journalists.

Beneath the façade

NUJP Vice Chair Joseph Alwyn Alburo disputed the presidential spin on press freedom during an interview with IPS.

“After the Ampatuan Massacre, there has been no improvement on the issue of journalist killings or in the overall plight of journalists in our country,” he said.

Alburo told IPS that 124 Filipino journalists have been killed on the job since the end of the former dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, but only 10 of those cases have been solved.

“We are one year away from mid-term legislative and local elections next May and, based on our information, the family that perpetrated the (2009) massacre still have relatives in power and are still amassing private armies even as their patriarch and other senior clan members are facing trial,” he added.

“The Philippines has the (unfortunate) distinction of being rated the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind Iraq and Somalia and the only one of the three which is a democracy. Nov. 23 has been designated as the World Day Against Impunity, but the current president (has not even blinked) an eye about the impact of these notorious distinctions on our country.”

“It is with great sadness that I say things are not going to improve because all the factors that give rise to a culture of impunity are still present. Journalists in this country are still very much in danger.”

Another channel for powerful politicians and tycoons to restrict media freedom is through frequent filing of criminal libel charges against journalists, he said. The NUJP and other media unions and associations are currently leading the movement to decriminalise these charges.

Significantly, on Jan. 28, the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolved that the laws in the Philippines that criminalise libel are incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

The decision came in response to an appeal by Davao broadcaster Alex Adonis, who was jailed from 2007-2008 for reporting correctly that a leading local politician had been caught in bed with his alleged mistress by the latter’s husband.

Another major concern for reporters is the concentration of media ownership. Alburo confirmed that NUJP is “closely watching” the widely reported drive by First Pacific Group Chief Executive Officer Manuel Pangilinan to acquire the television network ‘GMA 7’ for approximately 1.2 billion dollars.

The businessman already owns one TV network, telecommunication and power utilities and shares in three major newspapers.

“Such a concentration (of the media) often compromises journalist ethics and editorial independence,” Alburo said.

NUJP aims to “jump start” campaigns to stop the killing of journalists, push for the decriminalisation of libel against journalists and promote passage of a robust Freedom of Information Act in May, when the UNHRC is conducting a review of the Philippines’ human rights record under the ICCPR.

The NUJP and other newspaper, television and broadcast journalist unions held a meeting on May 3, which resulted in the ‘Manila Declaration on Media Workers’ Rights and Welfare’, to be used as a platform for future unity and campaigns.

Despite a pervasive mood that there is very little to celebrate, over 40 NUJP members gathered at the fifth consecutive annual ‘Press Jam’ to commemorate World Press Freedom Day at the Skarlet Jazz Club in Quezon City on the evening of May 2.

“It has always been a trait of Filipinos to be able to laugh amidst very serious situations and troubles, so we hold a Press Jam (where) we can sing and be carefree for at least one night,” said Alburo.

Still, the festivities were not completely lighthearted; the event featured drawings by the children of journalists who were murdered in the Ampatuan Massacre and other incidents.

The artwork expressed the fear and sadness that still surrounds the tragedy, such as a drawing with the plaintive question, ‘Why is Daddy sleeping so long?’

On an ironic poster asking ‘Is it more fun in the Philippines to be a journalist?’ one NUJP member wrote, ‘Yes, you feel like a survivor all the time’.

Another pundit had added, ‘With criminal libel, 152 killed since 1986, what more can you ask for?’

A more hopeful note was stuck by one NUJP member, who wrote, ‘Yes, so much to write about, so much to change’.

By Dennis Engbarth
MANILA, May 7 2012 (IPS)

The exclusion of certified labour union delegates from the official opening ceremony of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) meeting here on May 4 revealed a wide gap between the Manila-based development bank’s promises and practices on labour rights.

Over 70 members of the Global Union Federations (GUFs) held a silent protest at the official opening ceremony of the annual meeting of ADB governors at the Philippine International Convention Centre (PICC), after being prevented by police from entering the complex even though they were all certified delegates.

The delegates were mostly members of unions affiliated with the GUF, such as the Public Services International (PSI), the Building and Wood Workers International (BWI), the Union Network International (UNI) and the International Transport Federation (ITF).

Of the record 5,033 participants in the Manila assembly, 452 delegates represented civil society organisations, including trade unions, also a record turnout according to ADB data.

Unionists had originally intended to hold a silent protest within the plenary hall, but were prevented from entering the convention centre by security guards of Philippine President Benigno Aquino, who attended and delivered an address at the ceremony along with ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda.

“ADB officials later allowed us to enter since we were all delegates, but we had to walk around the PICC and by the time we got to the reception hall, the ceremony was over,” Laksmi Vaidhiyanathan, regional secretary of PSI told IPS.

“We were very unhappy, but they were probably doing this because of the president’s security,” observed Vaidhiyanathan, who added that union delegates planned to write a collective letter of protest to the ADB president, calling on the regional bank to “walk the talk” and “respect workers’ rights.”

Participants in the protest wore white T-shirts bearing the “Global Unions” logo and sported red and white headbands with the slogans, “ADB, Respect Workers’ Rights” and “ADB, Promote Pro-Poor, Pro- Worker Growth.”

Ironically, the delegates had worn similar headbands during a dialogue meeting held between ADB President Kuroda and other senior ADB officials and representatives of civil society organisations (CSOs) attending the conference on May 2.

Jacques Ferreira, a consultant for environmental CSOs and a former senior ADB staff member, told IPS, “The ADB has come a long way from seeing CSOs as things from another planet, to recognising them as useful partners, but the dialogue with labour groups is relatively new compared to environmental and development organisations.”

“The most important condition for partnership is trust and for that to be effective, each side must speak the same language,” Ferreira said.

Whether ADB management and labour representatives speak the same language remains uncertain even though there is considerable dialogue.

During the May 2 meeting, the trade union delegation raised four issues, including a proposal for the Manila-based development bank to assist trade union federations and include CSOs in the regional Asian financial stabilisation dialogue recently announced by the ADB.

Kuroda replied that ensuring that the ADB financial dialogue and other projects in critical areas such as climate change “be inclusive and well-governed” was “very important” and should take a tripartite form, including finance ministers, central bankers and financial supervisors; but he did not respond directly to the question of whether or how labour unions or CSOs could be involved.

On May 3, union delegates and ADB officials also appeared to talk past each other during a seminar on socially inclusive growth and core labour standards.

“Our key message is very straight forward,” said PSI Vice President Annie Geron.

“It is very important for us that core labour standards approved by the ADB under its Social Protection Strategy in 2001 should be faithfully complied and observed,” she stated during a seminar on socially inclusive growth on May 3.

According to Geron, the ADB should define an action plan with global targets for its social protection strategy, specify how the bank can contribute to the protection and respect of core labour rights, define how the bank can assist in targeting equality of outcomes and not only equality of access and support the adoption of financial transaction taxes to fund job intensive recoveries.

Geron related that in several power plant projects financed by the ADB, researchers found numerous violations of core labor standards including denial of collective bargaining, harassment of unionists, retrenchements and rehiring of workers at lower wage rates and, in at least one case, the use of bonded labor at power plant projects financed by ADB in India, Indonesia and the Philippines.

“We are raising these issues again and again because there has been no improvement,” related Geron, who cited numerous examples of violations of core labour standards in ADB financed projects.

“Inclusive growth cannot occur without protection and respect for worker rights,” commented Ariel Castro, a senior specialist with the International Labor Office (ILO) based in New Delhi, adding that the ILO supports promotion of employment-intensive investment and green growth initiatives.

But Castro warned that while Asia has been the most dynamic region, “this region has not seen enough jobs and decent work from this growth,” adding that “there has only been an increase of one to two percent in employment expansion in the six to seven percent annual economic growth.”

In response, ADB Deputy Chief Economist Zhuang Juzhong acknowledged that Asia’s high rates of growth had witnessed higher levels of inequality, but also maintained “more growth would lead to more employment” and, in turn, higher wages and a higher income share for labour, which would in turn “reduce inequality.”

In the closing press conference on May 5, Kuroda said “It is unfortunate that some members from civil society organisations could not join the opening session,” but affirmed that the ADB annual meeting is open to CSOs.

Kuroda added that ADB is in close contact with experts on labour market issues and trade union issues through the ILO and did not respond on the question of whether the Bank should establish a specific department for labour issues.

IBON International’s director Antonio Tujan told IPS, “ADB should be responsible for ensuring that the corporations (they deal with) on investment and construction projects abide by these core labour standards but unfortunately this appears not to be the case in practice.”

Taiwanese civic activists and opposition parties are persisting in efforts to block imports of high-risk American beef even though the ruling rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) legislative majority narrowly defeated a push by opposition legislators Apr. 27 to suspend imports of American beef products.

Activists for Taiwan’s National Food Safety Alliance call for a ban on ractopamine-laced U.S. beef. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS.

The legislative clash followed the outbreak in California of a native case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), otherwise known as “mad cow disease” on Apr. 24.

BSE is a fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord.

After the first reported outbreak of BSE in the U.S. in December 2003, the DPP government then suspended U.S. beef imports, a ban that was partially lifted in June 2005 and, with the exceptions of products such as beef on bone and various offals, in January 2006.

However, without consulting consumer protection and health NGOs, the restored KMT government of President Ma Ying-jeou signed a protocol with Washington in October 2009 that mandated the lifting of Taiwan’s existing ban on imports of bone-in beef, intestines and ground beef.

In the wake of a storm of protest, lawmakers reinserted restrictions on imports of brains, intestines and ground beef from countries with BSE risk, including the U.S., in the food safety law in January 2010, but permitted the importation of T-bone steaks and other “beef on bone” produce.

In the wake of the latest BSE outbreak, the Taiwan government initially maintained that there was no need to suspend U.S. beef imports.

In response, lawmakers from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, the Taiwan Solidarity Union and the People First Party won a 42 to 39 vote in a full session of the 113-seat national legislature to change the legislative agenda on Apr. 27 and put to a floor vote a resolution to suspend imports of all U.S. beef and beef products, and remove U.S. beef and products from display shelves and markets.

An emergency mobilisation by the ruling KMT caucus blocked the resolution by a 44-45 vote as KMT Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng cast a tie-breaking vote for the first time in nearly a decade.

National Food Safety Alliance spokesman Ho Tsung-hsun told IPS that as the speaker, Wang should have maintained political neutrality, but instead “put the interests of the ruling party above those of the people.”

Moreover, Ho added that the result showed that the ruling party “should be able to muster enough votes to defend the government’s decision” to open Taiwan’s market to ractopamine – laced beef imports.

“Our alliance will have no option other than to push for recall votes against KMT legislators who support deregulation next year and let the people have a chance to display their views,” Ho added.

Nevertheless, the lack of consensus in the ruling party ranks was exposed by the failure of 19 KMT lawmakers to appear for the vote, despite the prospect of party discipline.

While most of the no-shows cited “family affairs” or “scheduling conflicts” to explain their absence, KMT at-large lawmaker Ms Yang Li-huan frankly told reporters that “if we import and give the people foodstuffs that we shouldn’t import and that are poisonous and illnesses break out in a few years, who will bear responsibility?”

While the resolution did not pass, it may have had political impact.

On Apr. 30, Department of Health Minister Chiu Hung-ta stated that the DOH will send a delegation to the United States to inspect slaughter houses and added that if the OIE raised the level of the alert over BSE in the U.S., the Taiwan government “will immediately suspend imports of U.S. beef and beef products.”

Moreover, the fate of the KMT government’s plan to liberalise imports of U.S. beef with residue of the growth drug ractopamine was thrown into doubt by the BSE outbreak, the Apr. 27 legislative vote and an Apr. 28 mayoral by-election.

On Apr. 22, the DOH had issued a surprise announcement that it had set an “acceptable daily intake” for ractopamine intake of 1 microgram per kilogram, the same level that is used presently in Japan and Australia compared to the 1.25 microgram ADI adopted by the U.S.

The announcement came one day before the Social Welfare and Health Committee of Taiwan’s national legislature was slated to review proposed changes to the food safety regulation law and was decried as a “surprise attack against the Legislature and the health of the Taiwan people” by DPP Legislator Ms Tien Chiu-chin.

The KMT government has proposed changes to the food regulatory rule book that would authorise the Cabinet itself to set a “safe standard” for residues for additive such as ractopamine, while the DPP proposes a “zero indication” standard and other lawmakers call for direct bans or for the Legislative Yuan itself to set the standard.

Despite the defeat on the BSE resolution, opposition lawmakers succeeded on Apr. 27 in blocking an attempt by the KMT to refer the ractopamine-related draft revisions directly to a second reading.

“If the revisions were sent directly into a second reading, the KMT would have been able to put the process into a black box of party-to-party negotiations and there would be no opportunities for public hearings or direct debate on the articles in committee,” said Soochow University political science professor Lo Chih- cheng.

Another variable was added Apr. 28 when the potency of the recall threat raised by food safety activists was bolstered by the stunning victory scored by the opposition DPP the day after the Legislative vote.

In a by-election for the mayoralty of the historic port city Lukang on the central west Taiwan coast, DPP candidate Huang Chen-yen trounced a KMT rival by a 71 percent to 29 percent margin even though the previous mayor was a KMT politician who is now a legislator.

“The big margin of victory for the DPP in Lukang township by-election shows that there is a real possibility that recall campaigns could succeed,” said Lo.

“This vote indicates that Ma is already a lame duck and KMT legislators will have to watch out for themselves if they want to stay in office or get elected,” said Lo. “The beef issue is far from resolved.”

The first official national human rights report issued by Taiwan’s rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government disappointed civil society and human rights advocates, who have described the document as “an empty shell” and “insincere”.

The report was released Apr. 20 by President and ruling KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou just over three years after Taiwan’s national legislature ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Since it is not a member of the United Nations, the Taiwan government could not deposit the ratifications with the UN Secretariat and instead incorporated both covenants directly into domestic law through an implementation statute effective Dec. 10, 2009.

Entitled ‘The National Human Rights Report of the Republic of China’, the three-volume document contains a review of Taiwan’s accession to the two covenants, an overview of economic, political, social and cultural conditions and an article by article assessment of the government’s compliance with the articles of two covenants and the implementation law.

President Ma stated that he was “pleased” with the publication of the report, which he emphasised was drafted “not for the sake of appearances but to really bring domestic human rights standards in line with the world.”

The president said his administration would work to improve its human rights performance by completing revisions of laws and regulations in line with the requirements of the two covenants and by intensifying education and training in human rights concepts for government officials, who he said, “are the most prone to infringe on human rights.”

However, Covenants Watch convenor Kao Yung-cheng, a former member of the presidential human rights commission, stated that the content of the report showed that the Ma government had “bounced its cheque” on human rights.

On behalf of the 53-organisation coalition formed to monitor Taiwan’s implementation of the two covenants, Kao said the report “avoided substantive discussion of numerous human rights issues and even ignored many current incidents of grave infringement on fundamental human rights.”

Kao said publication of the report “was a grave irony” in the light of recent “institutional government violations of basic human rights”, including “judicial persecution of citizens, curbs on the people’s right of free expression, unrestrained forced takeover of farmland and evictions in urban renewal projects.”

The Covenants Watch convenor also stated that the Ma government had failed to fulfill the implementation statute’s requirement that all laws, regulations and measures contravening the two covenants had to be revised or eliminated within two years or by Dec. 10, 2011.

Kao said that the government had failed to revamp or abrogate 76 of 263 laws or regulations earmarked for revision, including restrictions on human rights in the Assembly and Parade Law, Labour Insurance Law, the Statute for the Resolution of Laboor-Management Disputes, the Union Law, the Nationalities Law and the Criminal Code as well as several laws that restrict freedom of expression or freedom of the press.

A press release issued by Covenants Watch portrayed the new report with picture of an ostrich with its head buried in the ground.

Among the aspects that attracted criticism from human rights advocates was the absence of any indication that the Ma government would reverse its decision to end a five-year tacit moratorium on executions begun under the previous Democratic Progressive Party government that was broken with the execution of four death sentences on Apr. 30, 2010 and five on Mar. 4, 2011.

At the news conference, Ma promised to “gradually eliminate the death penalty” by dropping mandatory death penalties from the legal code, reducing the scope of “relative death penalties” in criminal law and urging prosecutors to refrain from requesting death sentences. Ma declared that death penalties will only be carried out after all legal channels have been utilised.

Saying that “Taiwan’s current amnesty law and the two sets of executions absolutely violate the two covenants,” Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty executive director Ms Lin Hsin-yi said the previous DPP government had already eliminated all mandatory death penalties in the legal code in 2006 and noted that the justice ministry now only plans to drop death penalties in laws that are rarely used or for statutes that are outdated.

The TAEDP executive director also described Ma’s statement that his government will only carry out death penalties after all legal channels for appeal have been completed as “a blatant lie”.

Lin said that defence lawyers never received a response to petitions filed on behalf of 44 death row inmates for presidential pardons on Mar. 29, 2010 and stated that an appeal to the Constitutional Court filed on behalf of one of the four convicts executed on Apr. 30, 2010 was still in process when he was shot.

Kao said the alliance would issue a “counter-report” by May 20, the date for Ma’s inauguration for a second four-year term.

Ma won re-election Jan. 14 with 51.6 percent of 13.35 million valid votes compared to 45.6 percent for centre-left DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen and 2.8 percent for conservative People First Party chairman James Soong.

However, approval ratings for Ma and his administration dipped to below 20 percent after his re-election in the wake of controversial decisions to permit imports of beef with ractopamine residue from the United States and to sharply hike power and fuel prices.

By Dennis Engbarth and - -
TAIPEI, Mar 18 2012 (IPS)

Taiwan civic activists and opposition parties have launched efforts to block plans by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government to “conditionally deregulate” the import of United States-produced beef containing residues of ractopamine, a controversial “growth enhancing” chemical used in cattle feed.

A Taiwanese woman protests outside the national legislature against a decision to ‘conditionally deregulate’ import of ractopamine-laced U.S. beef. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS.

Taiwan currently bans domestic use of ractopamine and most other “leanness enhancing” drugs in livestock production, and the import of meat products that are found to contain any residues or traces of ractopamine.

Taiwan would seem to be a minor market for U.S. beef. Only 3.7 percent of the 5.42 billion dollars worth of beef and “variety” products (such as brain, eyes, intestines and spinal cords often called ‘offals’) exported annually by the U.S. is destined for Taiwan, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data. Nevertheless, Washington has put intense pressure on Taipei to fully deregulate controls on imported beef and pork products.

DPP Legislator Lin Chia-lung told IPS that Washington “aims to use Taiwan as a platform to open the markets of other countries to U.S. beef, including China, Japan and South Korea and to use Taiwan as a decisive breakthrough point to push through approval of standards for ractopamine in the Codex Commission.”

After failing to secure major concessions from the previous DPP government, Washington secured a signing of a secret protocol with the Ma government in October 2009 that lifted restrictions on imports of U.S. beef-in-bone, ground beef and assorted ‘offals’, thus overturning a ban imposed by the DPP administration after the detection of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) in the U.S. in December 2003.

Ultimately, civic protests and a legislative revolt forced the KMT government to accept revisions in the food health regulatory act that partially re-imposed restrictions on ground beef, brains, eyes, spinal cords and intestines and led to the resignation of Ma’s national security advisor.

Similarly, in the wake of vocal civic opposition to Ma’s commitment to Burkhardt, more than half of the 113-seat national legislature, including over 30 of 64 KMT lawmakers, co-sponsored or supported draft revisions to the Food Health Regulation Act that would effectively continue the ban by imposing a ‘zero indication’ testing standard.

Nevertheless, Economic Affairs Minister Shih Yen-hsiang told lawmakers Mar. 8 that that Washington considered Taipei’s position a “litmus test for whether Taiwan is a reliable trading partner.” Pro-KMT economists publicly warned that the deadlock was causing the suspension of bilateral trade and investment talks and could block plans to allow visa-entry into the U.S. for Taiwan citizens.

After three seminars with government officials and health experts failed to reach a consensus, the KMT cabinet issued a news release late on Mar. 5 announcing its plan for “conditional deregulation”.

The new policy would allow imports of U.S. beef with a maximum residue level of ractopamine to be determined by official agencies but would still ban import of internal organs and other beef offals, prohibit importation of pork and pork products with ractopamine residues and require U.S. beef products with ractopamine to be clearly marked “so that consumers can make their own choice.”

National Taiwan University (NTU) School of Veterinary Medicine dean Chou Chin-cheng, a member of the technical advisory commission, told IPS that there simply has not been any credible research on the direct impact of ractopamine residues in beef or pork on human consumers, and stressed that the growth enhancing drug may pose risks to certain consumers, including infants or persons with high blood pressure or diabetes.

Chou also observed that the Codex Alimentarius Commission set up by the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation to set food safety standards has failed to agree on safe maximum residue levels for ractopamine.

“The entry of ractoprine-laced beef into Taiwan’s market will exacerbate overall health risks,” said the NTU professor.

Despite official assurances that ractopamine is safe, a poll conducted by the KMT-friendly TVBS satellite television network of 1,107 Taiwan adults Mar. 12-13 showed that only 31 percent supported the Ma government’s conditional deregulation policy and 59 percent said they did not approve.

The Cabinet’s furtive decision also sparked a protest by hundreds of citizens Mar. 8 outside the Cabinet complex in Taipei. The demonstration was organised by the Taiwan Anti-American Beef Alliance (TAABA), a coalition of over 60 food health, consumer protection, environmental and civic organisations.

On Mar. 9, thousands of swine farmers protested the KMT government’s deregulation outside the national legislature, and then marched to the Council of Agriculture, where farmers clashed with police and threw eggs at the COA office.

Taiwan Swine Farmers Association chairman Pan Lien-chou warned that “once the ban is lifted, domestic swine production will be unable to bear unequal foreign competition.”

On Mar. 12, the mayors of all six DPP-administered municipalities, encompassing 7.2 million of Taiwan’s 23.2 million people, declared their intention to set zero indication standards for ractopamine in their districts.

On Mar. 15, TAABA reorganised itself as the National Alliance for Food Safety with more than 100 civic groups as members, at a rally outside the Cabinet complex.

Ho Tsung-hsun, executive director of Taiwan’s Life Conservationist Association, told IPS that the new alliance will push for a total ban on ractopamine and will also campaign for full transparency and the institutionalisation of citizen participation in government food safety policy making.

Ho observed that the deregulation, which is opposed by the DPP and two other minor parties, could be blocked if only 11 of the 33 KMT lawmakers who previously opposed the move maintained their stands.

Citing the discovery of the use of illegal growth enhancing drugs in domestic pork and a recent major outbreak in H5N2 avian influenza in chickens, Ho stated that “this campaign will be a long-term struggle since the problem is not only U.S. beef imports but the prospect of the collapse of our entire food safety system and the subversion of our democratic system.”

Excerpt:

Voters in Taiwan’s upcoming presidential and national legislative elections will also decide the fate of a bitterly controversial 9.3 billion dollar nuclear power plant.

A DPP signboard in Yilan County asks voters to not let Yilan become another Fukushima. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS.

Nearly 14 million of Taiwan’s 23 million people will go to the polls Jan. 14 to choose between three presidential contenders, namely incumbent President and ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou, 61, Democratic Progressive Party Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen, 56, and People First Party Chairman James Soong, 69, a former KMT secretary-general.

The issue of whether Taiwan should continue to rely on nuclear power for nearly a fifth of its electricity needs became a major campaign issue after the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant triggered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami Mar. 11.

Taiwan’s three existing nuclear plants, all operated by the state-owned Taiwan Power Co, were built in the 1970s during the four decades when the KMT government exercised martial law rule.

Two nuclear power plants in the northernmost corner of Taiwan each have two General Electric designed boiling water reactors (BWR) similar to those operating at Fukushima, and are currently scheduled to end service by late 2018. The third plant sited at Taiwan’s southern tip has two Westinghouse pressurised water reactors (PWR) and is slated for retirement by late 2025.

The fourth plant, now being built by Taipower at Gungliao village in New Taipei City on Taiwan’s northeastern coast, will feature two 1,350-megawatt advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR) units designed by GE and Toshiba, but has been bitterly opposed for two decades by local residents, the DPP and environmentalists, who have long called for a referendum on the project.

Shortly after the Fukushima disaster, Tsai proposed a “2025 Nuclear-Free Home Plan” to phase out nuclear power by retiring the three existing plans on the current schedule or earlier and by not allowing the fourth nuclear power plant to load fuel or begin commercial operation. This, Tsai said, would avoid adding a fourth “time bomb” to the three existing plants on one of the world’s most seismic risky territories.

Speaking to Taiwan’s six major industrial and commercial federations in late November, the DPP chairwoman said that “nuclear power is not a clean and inexpensive source of electricity but actually is the most expensive source of power when front-end and back-end and externalised costs, such as dealing with radioactive waste, are considered.”

Tsai acknowledged that the attempt to halt construction of Nuclear Four in October 2000 by the previous DPP government, which governed Taiwan from May 2000 to May 2008 after 55 years of KMT rule, had failed due to “insufficient dialogue and a lack of social consensus.”

The order issued in October 2000 by then DPP Premier Chang Chun-hsung to halt Nuclear Four was overturned by the national legislature, which was controlled by the pro-nuclear KMT, which regained power in May 2008 with Ma’s election.

“After Fukushima, our society has realised that nuclear power is not only expensive but is also unsafe,” said Tsai, who calls for Taiwan’s transformation into a “nuclear-free home” as one of the DPP’s three core measures to achieve “justice and equity”, “sustainability” and “generational justice”.

Besides not allowing Nuclear Four to enter commercial operation, Tsai advocates a mix of strategies to reduce and finally end dependence on nuclear power.

Such measures would include promoting green and knowledge-based industries, eliminating energy subsidies to carbon, energy or pollution-intensive sectors, improving energy efficiency and conservation to curb demand, boosting the efficiency of thermal power plants and adding at least 1 percent annually in renewable energy capacity.

Tsai said that her party’s plan was “responsible and feasible” since there were 13 years to develop renewable and alternative energy sources to supplant nuclear power.

National Taiwan University Professor of Economics Lin Shang-kai told IPS that allowing Nuclear Four to be completed but not allowing it to load fuel or operate would avoid the necessity to receive legislative approval for its cancellation.

“If Tsai is elected, her government can simply decide not to turn the key,” stated the NTU economist, who added that “Taiwan could shut down all three nuclear power plants immediately and still not face any shortage of electricity.”

President Ma had initially endorsed the safety of Taipower’s nuclear plants and the rapid entry into commercial operation of the Nuclear Four project, but moderated his position in early November. He stated that, if re-elected to a second four-year term, he would allow Nuclear Four to begin commercial operation before 2016 “on the basis of assured safety.”

Ma said progress toward ending the use of nuclear power in Taiwan could take place under conditions of “no restrictions on electricity supply, maintaining reasonable electricity prices and fulfilling international commitments to reduce carbon emissions.”

The President added that if Nuclear Four’s two reactor units came on line before 2016, his government would not extend the operating life of the first nuclear power plant at Chinshan in northern Taiwan.

However, after hearing a presentation by Taipower on measures to deal with major structural problems raised by critics, AEC deputy chairman Huang Ching-tung announced after a meeting of Nuclear Four Safety Monitoring Committee Dec. 20 that the project would continue under “intensified monitoring” despite objections by civil society representatives.

Green Citizens’ Action Alliance secretary-general Tsui Shu-hsin said Taipower’s improvement plan “cannot resolve the Nuclear Four’s structural problems,” while DPP Legislator Tien Chiu-chin said that neither Huang or Taipower Executive vice-president Hsu Hwai-chiung replied to her question as to “how much more money in addition to the 9 billion dollars already invested will be needed to ensure 100 percent safety.

“It is impossible to guarantee 100 percent safe operation of Nuclear Four, but Taiwan would be devastated by a nuclear accident like Fukushima and cannot afford any possibility of such an incident at all,” said Tien.

By Dennis Engbarth and - -
TAIPEI, Dec 14 2011 (IPS)

Senior representatives of Amnesty International and the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network have urged the Taiwan government to “uphold fairness and justice” in its judicial system and resume a broken moratorium on use of the death penalty.

Amnesty International and the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN) together with the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty have published a regional report ‘When Justice Fails: Thousands Executed in Asia after Unfair Trials’ focussed on the 14 countries in the region which retain the death penalty, including Taiwan.

After reviewing what constitutes a “fair trial” and the importance of the right to fair trial in death penalty cases, the new AI/ADPAN report highlights laws and practices that undermine the right to fair trial in eight Asian countries.

These barriers include reliance on “confessions” extracted through torture and other forms of ill-treatment as core or sole sources of evidence, the retention of mandatory death sentences including for non-lethal crimes, the lack of the presumption of innocence, inadequate guarantees for the right to legal counsel, the lack of effective processes for review and to seek clemency and the lack of transparency and independence in special courts and rushed proceedings and offers recommendations for improvement.

“The consequence of the high number of executions in Asian countries and the widespread application of unfair trials in death penalty retaining countries in Asia makes miscarriages of justice a reality, just as in the case of Chiang Kuo-ching in Taiwan,” said Louise Vischer, ADPAN coordinator in AI’s Asia-Pacific Regional Programme.

The new ADPAN campaign is calling for action for seven other persons facing execution in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan and Singapore in addition to the case of Chiou Ho-shun of Taiwan.

Vischer related that all eight cases are “at crucial points in the legal process with real risks of execution following unfair trials. Since no judicial process is perfect and can exclude all possibility of error, the only way to protect against executing innocents is to abolish the death penalty,” the ADPAN coordinator said.

“ADPAN has sympathy with the victims of crime, but the death penalty is not an effective means of combatting crime and that the victims of crime become double victims when innocent persons are executed and the real perpetrators are not brought to justice,” stated Vischer.

Catherine Baber, deputy director for the Asia-Pacific programme of Amnesty International, stated that Taipei was chosen as the site to release the report Dec. 8 after the Taiwan government broke a nearly five- year tacit moratorium on execution of death penalties. That was with executions of four defendants in April 2010 and five in March 2011 despite having ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and incorporating their provisions into domestic law March 2009.

Baber related that Taiwan’s justice ministry admitted earlier this year that the late Air Force private Chiang Kuo-ching had been wrongly executed in August 1997 on charges of raping and murdering a five-year old girl the previous year and that President Ma Ying-jeou had made a public apology to Chiang’s family.

“This apology was too little and too late for Chiang’s family and by publishing this report in Taiwan we hope to ensure that there will be no more cases of Chiang Kuo-ching in Asia,” Baber stated.

“Taiwan has chosen to be bound by international standards, but actions speak louder than fine rhetoric,” said Baber, who specifically criticized Taiwan for “executing defendants last April whose appeals for clemency were still in process

“The addition of 15 confirmed death sentences this year has imparted greater urgency to our call on the Taiwan government to restore the moratorium, especially as some of the cases are based on confessions extracted through torture and will lead to new miscarriages of justice,” said Baber.

Baber said the new campaign highlighted the case of Chiou Ho-shun, who is now the subject of an AI ‘Urgent Action’ appeal, because his conviction in 1989 on charges of kidnapping and murdering a nine- year old boy Lu Cheng and another woman were was based only on a confession that was extracted through torture during interrogation.

Chiou’s case had rebounded between the Taiwan High Court and Taiwan Supreme Court 11 times since 1989 until his death sentence was finally confirmed by the Supreme Court on Jul. 28 and his request for an extraordinary appeal rejected by the Office of the Public Prosecutor General Aug. 25.

Greg Yo, Chiou’s defence lawyer, stated that his client’s conviction and death sentence were upheld despite the fact that video and sound recordings of the interrogation revealed that Chiou and his co- defendants had been tortured and even though two public prosecutors and 10 police officers investigating the Lu Cheng case were convicted of extracting confessions through torture.

Yo related that judges during Chiou’s case had stated that “they did not want to hear any more about ‘torture’.

“The case of Chiou Ho-shun contradicts claims that such practices and mentalities are limited to the military and do not exist in the civilian judicial system,” said stated Yo, who added that “if Chiou Ho-shun can be executed based on a confession taken by torture, he will become another Chiang Kuo-ching.”

TAEDP Executive Director Lin Hsin-yi stated that the Taiwan government’s “words contradict its actions.”

Lin related that the initial draft of Taiwan’s first national report on the implementation of the two human rights covenants released by the Ministry of Justice on Oct. 25 dropped previous presidential commitments to “gradually abolish the death penalty” and promised only to “decrease the use of the death penalty as a long-term aim.”

Moreover, Lin related that the Taiwan Supreme Court had confirmed 15 death sentences as of the end of November 2011, bringing the total list of persons on death row to 54, and said several of the new cases included convictions based only on confessions and for non-lethal crimes.

“After ratifying the two human rights covenants and their guarantees for the right to life, the Taiwan government has gone in a reverse direction,” said Lin.

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth and - -
TOKYO, Nov 10 2011 (IPS)

Seven months after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated northeastern Japan, Japanese citizens and relief organisations are working to learn from the tragedy in order to mitigate the fatal impact of future natural calamities at home and abroad.

Devastation from the Mar. 11 tsunami swept through Yotukura fishing village. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS

The new ‘Peace Boat Disaster Relief Volunteer Leader Training Programme’ which aims to train about 4,000 Japanese and international volunteers, began its first eight-day session on Nov. 5 in Ishinomaki.

The port suffered the greatest loss of life of any Japanese city from the combined 9.0 magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami which struck on the afternoon of Mar. 11. In all 3,278 persons died and 688 were reported missing in a population of nearly 163,000. A third of the city’s civil service staff were killed in the disaster. Across Japan, nearly 20,000 are confirmed killed or missing.

Ishinomaki has been the focal point for disaster relief support by Japanese and international NGOs. According to a report issued by the organisation in early October, Peace Boat alone had coordinated 6,695 volunteers with 34,388 working days by end-August. “This is the first time civil society organisations have coordinated disaster relief volunteers on this scale in Japan,” Peace Boat International coordinator Takahashi Maho told IPS.

But, Takahashi said, “there were not enough organisations active in training personnel to act in the vital coordinating roles as volunteer leaders who can help manage disaster relief centres, liaise with local governments and other organisations and manage teams of volunteers safely and effectively.

“It took us a couple of weeks to train volunteers – and the first two weeks are crucial in disaster response and relief. We hope to mitigate the damage from the time lost this time by using the lessons and being ready for the next time,” Takahashi told IPS.

The new training programme will include three days of workshops and discussions on natural disasters, field training in the fundamentals of disaster relief volunteer work, basic training in psychological first aid, safety and crisis management and the function and role of volunteer leaders.

Participants will end the course with two days of ‘on the job’ training through managing their own team of volunteers and learning how to react to various possible situations in disaster relief efforts. Graduates will receive certification of training as ‘disaster relief volunteer leaders’ or go on for an advanced course to become ‘certified disaster relief trainers’.

“We hope to both train individual volunteers and share this model with other NGOs, local governments and the national government,” added Takahashi.

The training sessions, two of which will be held each month, will initially only be in Japanese, but Peace Boat aims to offer English language training to international volunteers early next year.

Ishinomaki is being made a model for what civil society can do. Peace Boat president Yamamoto Takashi said when he first arrived on Mar. 17, “I could not believe this was Japan.” Shortages of food, water and fuel persisted until April, he said.

In cooperation with the Ishinomaki City Social Welfare Council, many domestic and international NGOs were able to send thousands of volunteers into the city for the arduous clean-up operation under the umbrella of the Ishinomaki Disaster Relief Assistance Council established by about 30 NGOs and the local authority to coordinate volunteer operations.

Yamamoto said worries that the arrival of volunteers would complicate rescue and relief efforts proved misplaced. “There was a total of about 40,000 short-term and long-term volunteers through here,” Yamamoto said. “We thought it would take nearly two years, but with lots of hard work by volunteers, the clean-up process has gone smoothly.”

By mid-October, remarkable progress had been made in cleaning the city of the hundreds of thousands of tons of mud and debris brought by the earthquake and tsunami. Amid shattered factory buildings, some activity was already returning to the port.

A signal of transition from disaster response to recovery was the closure of shelters on Oct. 13 with the completion of transfer of displaced persons to alternative housing or temporary housing. But Yamamoto cautioned that temporary housing “has its own problems.”

The biggest remains the lack of jobs and transportation. “Ishinomaki’s main industry was fishing, followed by the Nippon Paper Mill and agriculture, but fishing has almost entirely been wiped out,” said Yamamoto.

Takahashi told IPS that the relief needs of the local community have been shifting from the clean-up towards how to restart businesses, cleaning local factories and fishing villages, and preparing for the onslaught of winter.

To help rebuild community in temporary housing, the Peace Boat Relief Group also launched a four page Japanese language weekly ‘Temporary Housing News’ to provide essential information to residents.

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Sep 30 2011 (IPS)

A Taiwan military tribunal has confirmed that the late Air Force private Chiang Kuo-ching had been wrongfully executed in August 1997 for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl. But campaigners against the death penalty doubt that this will restore the moratorium on capital punishment the Taiwan government broke in April last year.

Nine inmates have been executed by shooting since President Ma Ying-jeou’s right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government ended the nearly five-year tacit moratorium on executions that began in 2005 under the previous centrist Democratic Progressive Party government (DPP).

Speaking to the legislative judicial committee Sep. 28, Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu denied media reports that up to 10 of the 51 convicts whose death sentences have been confirmed will be executed shortly after this year’s National Day celebrations Oct. 10. He said “there is no timetable for the executions” and that “at present there is no concrete plan or list of convicts.”

But the justice minister also said that the ministry “will not give advance notice publicly but will only officially make a public announcement after the sentences have been executed.” This was despite objections by human rights groups that this policy blocks families from a last meeting.

After a three-month retrial, Ministry of National Defence northern district military court judge Liu Yu-wei announced on Sep. 13 that a panel of three military judges had found that Chiang Kuo-ching, who was 23 at the time of his execution was “not guilty” of the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl at an Air Force headquarters complex in Taipei city in September 1996.

The court stated that Chiang had been “locked in” as the prime suspect after failing to pass a lie detector test administered by Investigation Bureau agents, and acknowledged that Air Force counter-intelligence agents acting under the orders of then Air Force Commander and later defence minister Chen Chao-min had “used improper methods to obtain a confession from the defendant and used the confession to bolster weak forensic and physical evidence.”

A decade long campaign by his father, Chiang Chih-an and mother Wang Tsai-lien had led to a call by the Control Yuan, Taiwan’s watchdog branch of government, to open the case in May 2010.

Compensation, which could amount to nearly NT100 million dollars (3.2 million U.S. dollars), is being considered by the government. But Wang told reporters that “if Chen Chao-min is let off and judged innocent, then any reparations would be meaningless.”

Executive director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty Lin Hsin-yi told IPS that “this is the first case in the history of the Taiwan judicial system in which a person was sentenced to death and executed and later proven to have been innocent.

“We believe there are many other similar cases which should be overturned,” said Lin, who added that Chiang was “relatively fortunate” because “at least his reputation has been cleared and the persons responsible for this injustice have been identified.”

The innocent verdict for Chiang Kuo-ching followed on the heels of two other reversals in June and August of life sentences in a murder case and a multiple rape case, in which the defendants were confirmed to have been wrongfully convicted based on “confessions” or eyewitness testimony despite inadequate or incorrect evidence.

Taiwan Human Rights Association secretary-general Tsai Chi-hsun told IPS that several of the 51 inmates awaiting execution were convicted based mainly on confessions, which the defendants maintain were the result of torture in interrogations, without convincing physical evidence.

The TAEDP’s Lin says the Chiang Kuo-ching case should open the door to recognition that the judicial system has grave problems. She says the only route for convicts whose death sentences have been certified by the Supreme Court is that of special appeal.

“But in Taiwan this path is virtually closed shut,” said Lin. The current justice minister and supreme public prosecutor have not approved any applications for special appeals “as they seem to see the special appeals as only a delaying tactic.”

As a result, Taiwan “also does not have a complete process for the petition for pardons or commutation of capital punishment as required by Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” said the TAEDP director.

TAEDP and other human rights groups have called for a moratorium and for changes in the criminal code to require a unanimous decision by a panel of three judges for death sentences, and to require the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments for death penalty cases instead of only reviewing written briefs, among other measures.

As part of a drive to bring Taiwan’s legal code in line with the two international covenants by Dec. 10, Justice Ministry first counsellor Peng Kun-yeh told IPS that two bills now awaiting legislative passage would drop the current mandatory death sentence for kidnapping unless the victim was murdered, and for causing serious harm to other persons in the process of smuggling unless a death was caused.

“These changes are in line with the principle that death sentence should be reserved only for the most serious crimes,” said Peng, who added he was optimistic that both sets of revisions would be approved by the legislature.

But TAEDP’s Lin says Taiwan’s current practices still fall short of the requirements listed in Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights for fair and complete defence against criminal charges, including a complete appeal process including the right to apply for special appeals or pardons or commutations of capital punishment.

“We should close our eyes and imagine how you would feel if you were like Chiang Kuo-ching and faced imminent execution for a crime you know you did not commit, or if you were his parents,” said opposition Democratic Progressive Party Legislator (Ms) Tien Chiu-chin.

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, May 29 2011 (IPS)

A coalition of Taiwan social activists has warned that the island country’s democracy is now in a state of ”stagnation” after three years of government under the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) administration of President Ma Ying-jeou.

During a ”Diagnosis of Democracy in Taiwan under the Ma administration” held in Taipei last week, the Taiwan Democracy Platform, a coalition of leading civic and social movement activists and scholars, highlighted a ”Top 10” list of ”democracy incidents”.

National Taiwan University Associate Professor of Law Ms Chen Chao-ju said the selection was made by 170 scholars, social activists, professional and lawyers from 60 major democracy incidents that occurred in Taiwan from May 1, 2010 to May 1, 2011, and finalised by the Taiwan Democracy Platform.

The list was led by the apparently successful civic struggle against a government-backed plan to construct a 20 billion dollar petrochemical industry complex offshore Changhua County on Taiwan’s west coast which environmentalists maintained would destroy rare marshland, add gravely to Taiwan’s ”carbon dioxide footprint” and fatally threaten the survival of the Taiwan Pink Dolphin.

In the wake of an intense campaign against the ”Kuokuang (National Glory) Project” and the inability to secure a clear endorsement from an environmental impact assessment commission, President Ma announced in late April that his administration would not build the complex in Changhua County.

Former Taiwan Environmental Protection Union president Ms Hsu Kuang-jung told IPS that Ma ”has left open the possibility that he might reverse his decision after the elections or build the Kuokuang complex somewhere else.”

Other environment-related incidents included a struggle over a government takeover of farm land to build a high technology plant near the high-profile Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park and the revival of Taiwan’s anti-nuclear power movement in the wake of the explosion of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in March and the Ma government’s declaration of continued support for the construction of a bitterly controversial 10 billion dollar fourth nuclear power plant in northeast Taiwan.

Three human rights and judicial incidents were also included, notably Ma’s decision to resume execution of death penalties that have included seven executions since April 2010 despite protests from domestic and international human rights groups and the finding by Taipei District prosecutors in January that Air Force private Chiang Kuo-ching had been tortured by Air Force counter-intelligence agents for a confession, convicted in a military tribunal and wrongly executed in August 1997 for the September 1996 rape and murder of a five-year old girl.

On May 24, prosecutors indicted another an Air Force private in the same unit for the murder but failed to file any charges against former defence minister and Air Force chief-of-staff Chen Chao-min and eight other military officers involved in Chiang’s interrogation and torture.

The list also included two incidents related to news freedom, namely interference by the ruling KMT in the selection of the board of directors of Taiwan’s public television network and the controversy over ”embedded advertising” by KMT government ministries and Chinese agencies in Taiwan’s mainstream television and print media.

The TDP listed ”political interference”, namely from the KMT government and ruling party lawmakers, in the selection of the management and organisation of Taiwan Public Television Service network as sixth on the list and the flap over ”news buying” through embedded advertising by KMT government ministries as seventh.

The TDP criticised ”the Ma government’s use of public resources and people’s taxes to ‘buy news’ and promote government policies on disputed issues including the ECFA, the Kuokuang petrochemical complex, nuclear power and KMT candidates in the Nov. 27 mayoral elections for five metropolises.

The TDP ”top 10” was completed with the rejection by a government ”referendum review commission” of several petitions by opposition parties and civic groups for a national citizen referendum on the controversial ”Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement” signed between non-official representatives of the Taiwan and Chinese governments on Jun. 29, 2010.

Cross-Strait Agreement Monitoring Alliance Convenor Lai Chung-chiang related that ”the Ma government used all sorts of pretexts to stymie and avoid national citizen referendum or legislative monitoring and supervision of cross-strait agreements including ECFA.”

Noting that the KMT government was willing to pass a special law that allowed a referendum on whether to permit casinos in the Penghu islands, Lai questioned whether the KMT government sees ”gambling as more important than cross-strait agreements that involve Taiwan’s sovereignty.”

Other issues that nearly made the ”Top 10” included lack of protection for the labour rights of ”atypical” workers and the rising number of deaths through overwork concerns for the security of financial information of Taiwan citizens in the wake of the KMT government’s decision to allow Chinese state-owned banks to establish branches or invest in Taiwan domestic banks, discrimination against indigenous peoples and rising concern over worsening wealth and income inequalities.

”This year’s list indicates that social justice issues may become the greatest crisis for Taiwan’s democracy,” said National Taiwan University Professor of Law Yen Chueh-an.

National Youth Alliance representative Ms Kuo Chu-yuan added that the citizen pressure had exercised a ”surprising” impact in the movement against the Kuokuang petrochemical complex and other resistance campaigns and ”have allowed us to see the concern, activism, creativity and determination of a new generation of youth for all kinds of social issues.”

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, May 3 2011 (IPS)

Taiwan may become the first country in East Asia with a female head of state if opposition Democratic Progressive Party Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen wins the island country’s fifth presidential election next Jan. 14.

Tsai Ing-wen with party rivals in the DPP nomination primary. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS.

Early opinion polls in mainstream media indicate that Tsai is now running neck to neck with incumbent President and right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou, 61, who was formally nominated by his party Apr. 27.

Taiwan began its transition to democratic government with the lifting in July 1987 of a four-decade old martial law decree imposed by a previous KMT authoritarian regime led by the late autocrat Chiang Kai- shek.

After narrowly defeating rival DPP contender and former premier Su Tseng-cheng in a national primary decided by opinion polls held Apr. 24-25, the 55-year-old Tsai is scheduled to be named by her party’s central executive committee as its candidate May 4.

Her path was partly paved by Annette Lu, a pioneer of Taiwan’s feminist movement and a former political prisoner under the former authoritarian KMT regime. She served as vice-president for eight years under former DPP president Chen Shui-bian from May 2000 to May 2008.

Born in Taiwan’s southern Pingtung County on Aug. 31, 1956, Tsai worked for several central government agencies after earning a doctorate in law from the London School of Economics in 1984.

In the mid-1990s, Tsai became a councillor in the National Security Council under Taiwan’s first native born president Lee Teng-hui and was a key drafter of Lee’s statement in July 1999 that relations between Taiwan and China had become “special state-to-state relations” in the wake of Taiwan’s democratisation.

Tsai served as chairwoman of the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council, which handled Taiwan’s policy towards China. She was a DPP legislator and vice-premier during the previous DPP administration.

Tsai took the helm of the DPP after the grassroots party suffered an electoral debacle in early 2008 as Ma won the presidency by a 58 percent landslide and the KMT won a three-fourths legislative majority.

Offering a professional image above DPP factional disputes, Tsai gradually rebuilt the opposition party’s unity, revived its reputation for competent governance and clean politics and led her party to win nine of 13 legislative by-elections and score gains in mayoral polls during the past three years.

In her first direct election test last November, Tsai turned in a stronger than expected performance but lost the race for the strongly pro-KMT New Taipei Municipality to former KMT vice-premier Eric Chu by a narrow margin.

However, Tsai’s emergence as a national political leader was also due to the disappointing performance of the incumbent.

A survey of 1,001 Taiwan adults in mid-April carried out by the Global Views Survey Research Company found that less than 33 percent were satisfied with Ma’s performance while almost 57 percent were dissatisfied and that Tsai enjoys a considerably higher level of trust form the electorate.

Political analysts say that Ma’s ratings have slipped for numerous reasons, notably the failure to reach his campaign promise to boost annual average economic growth to over six percent, perceptions of erosion in Taiwan’s international status, incompetent handling of disastrous floods that hit southern Taiwan in August 2009, a decline in public participation in policy making, and a lack of transparency in cross-strait negotiations with the People’s Republic of China.

Taiwan’s human rights ratings and international standing have also ebbed.

For example, since Ma took office, Taiwan’s rating for news freedom slipped in annual global surveys conducted by the New York-based Freedom House from 32nd in the world in 2008, the last year of DPP administration, to 48th in its most recent study, released May 2.

Key issues during the campaign are likely to range from economic development visions, Taiwan’s troubled relationship with the PRC, environmental and energy policy, poverty and social equity.

“Since the election is likely to be very close, both Ma and Tsai will have to respond to certain degrees to civil society concerns for the environment, and neither can ignore the question of rising poverty and wealth inequality and globalisation,” says Taiwan Labour Front Secretary-General Sun You-lien.

During the primary campaign, Tsai called for the realisation of a “nuclear free home” through the phase-out of all nuclear power plants by 2025, supported environmentalist calls to cancel a major state-backed petrochemical complex in western Taiwan, advocated a new direction that would emphasise creating jobs instead of boosting gross domestic product figures, and building a comprehensive social security system.

In outlining her views during four sets of debates before the DPP primary, Tsai said that Taiwan should foster its “economic dynamism and creativity” as an “oceanic nation” by deepening links with all major trading partners in a global framework to become “a shining star in Asia” instead of “single-mindedly embracing China” and turning into “a periphery to China.”

“If Tsai wins, it will mark a great honour for Taiwan and an inspiration to other patriarchal East Asian societies, including China, that a woman can be president in Taiwan’s democracy,” says Taiwan Solidarity Union Secretary-General Lin Chih-chia.

Nevertheless, a conservative backlash seems to be in the making as reflected by calls by some politicians and media for Tsai, who is unmarried, to reveal her sexual orientation.

Tsai refused to reply to such questions, saying that “if I respond, I will become an accomplice in promoting gender oppression.”

“There is nothing wrong in any gender, any gender preference and marriage pattern and no one has the right to question others about such issues,” said Tsai, who stated that Taiwan “needs more efforts to defend the human rights of all gender disadvantaged people.”

Excerpt:

Opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairwoman and former Vice Premier Tsai Ing-wen have announced a proposal for a “2025 Non-Nuclear Home Plan” that would allow Taiwan to eliminate reliance on nuclear power by the end of 2025.

Over 2,000 protestors participated in a "We Love Taiwan, We Don

Debate in Taiwan over nuclear power and the controversial 9.3 billion dollar fourth nuclear power plant here has been rekindled in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that stuck northeastern Japan – killing over 10,000 persons and triggering major explosions and release of radiation.

In response to Tsai’s announcement, state-owned Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) Executive Vice President Huang Hsien-chang stated Mar. 25 that to shift reliance to natural gas and renewable energies by 2025 is “almost impossible” and declared that “2025 is infeasible” to phase out nuclear power.

DPP Taipei City Councilwoman Hsu Chia-ching told IPS that “no one is advocating an immediate cessation of generation, but a gradual and balanced phase-out”.

In response to questions as to whether refusing to allow the new facility to operate would be a waste of money, Tsai said that “allowing Nuclear Four to operate and generate more radioactive spent fuel and waste would create a greater tragedy.”

“Nuclear power is the most expensive and risky method of power generation and if we don’t absolutely need it, why should we create so much danger and cause our people to live in fear?” asked Hsu. “The Taiwan people have never had a chance to directly express their will on whether to accept the risk of nuclear power.”

Over 2,000 residents near the fourth plant, environmentalists and opposition politicians participated in a rally last week with the theme “We Love Taiwan, We Don’t Want Nuclear Disasters”.

President Ma Ying-jeou has reaffirmed the safety of the three existing plants and aims to complete construction of the fourth 2,750-megawatt facility, but government officials say the plant’s opening will be delayed and a full inspection of existing plants will be conducted.

Tsai, who is standing for her party’s nomination to run for president against Ma in Taiwan’s next presidential race early next year, said her proposal aimed to spark dialogue on “how we can find new alternative energy sources so that Taiwan will no longer need to rely on nuclear energy by 2025”.

“The Fukushima disaster has shown that the danger of nuclear power plant disasters is greater than some people believed, and that the possibility for a similar event to happen in Taiwan is quite high,” Tsai stated.

The DPP chairwoman pointed out that six of the 564 existing or formerly operating nuclear power reactors around the globe had experienced serious accidents and cautioned that “both Japan and Taiwan are earthquake zones and what happened in Japan can definitely happen in Taiwan”.

“There is no way to implement a response plan for such an event, which would cause immeasurable harm to our people’s health and our economy and trade,” said Tsai, stressing that, “the cost is simply too high.”

Tsai says that, “if Taiwan does not need to rely on nuclear power by 2025, the first three nuclear power plants can be retired based on the current schedule and the fourth nuclear power plant will not need to commercially operate.”

Taiwan’s first two nuclear power plants, located at the northern tip of the island, each have two General Electric boiling water reactors (BWR). They are licensed for use by Taipower only until late 2018 and late 2019 and late 2021 and late 2023 respectively.

The two Westinghouse pressurised water reactors (PWR) in the third nuclear plant, which is located at the southern tip of Taiwan, are currently licensed for operation until late 2024 and late 2025.

Taipower has applied to the Atomic Energy Council for new 20-year licenses which would extend the operating lives of all three facilities.

At present, the controversial fourth nuclear power plant, which is being built in Yenliao township in New Taipei City on the coast of northeast Taiwan, will have two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR) which are scheduled to begin commercial operation in December 2012 and December 2013, respectively.

Tsai says the 2025 deadline would provide sufficient time for a process of “comprehensive and complete review” and “building social consensus”.

She points out that, according to Taipower’s data there was a reserve energy capacity margin of more than 23.4 percent last year, while the three existing nuclear power plants provided only 18 percent of total capacity.

“Even if all three nuclear power plants ceased generation, there would still be 5.4 percent in reserve margin capacity,” Tsai said, “which is better than what it was from 1992 through 1995.”

“What we need to do is find ways to boost this 5.4 percent to 15 percent, which is considered a safe margin in most advanced economies such as Taiwan,” she stressed.

Tsai also called for liberalisation of the power industry. “Allowing competition between private-sector power companies and Taipower would both enhance power generation efficiency and remove a barrier to the development of renewable energy industries,” said Tsai.

“I hope that we can avoid this question from becoming an election issue as we are willing to engage in dialogue with the ruling party as this issue concerns the safety of everyone living in Taiwan,” Tsai added.

The unfolding disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has reignited debate over Taiwan’s own nuclear power programme and the controversy over continuing construction of a fourth nuclear facility here.

Maanshan nuclear power plant from Kenting beach in southern Taiwan. Credit: M. Weitzel

In the wake of the earthquake and devastating tsunami that struck eastern Japan Mar. 11, President Ma Ying-jeou, who is also chairman of the ruling right-wing Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT), remains firm on one of the areas of most concern to Taiwan citizens – the future use and expansion of nuclear power in Taiwan.

After a briefing at the Atomic Energy Council Mar. 15, Ma declared that there was no need to cease operations of the existing three nuclear plants, and stated that construction of a controversial fourth facility should continue.

“There should be a national citizen referendum before fuel is loaded in ‘Nuclear Four’,” Kao Cheng-yen, former president of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union, told IPS.

“The government is only telling us to be calm and not to worry,” said Taipei Association for the Promotion of Women’s Rights Secretary-General Karen Cheng.

The three facilities, located respectively in Chinshan and Kuosheng in northern Taiwan, and Maanshan at the southern tip of the island, have four General Electric designed boiling water reactors similar to those operating at Fukushima and two Westinghouse pressurised water reactors.

The three plants entered operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s during the four-decade long period of authoritarian martial law imposed by the KMT regime. The plants are currently scheduled to end service in late 2017, late 2018, and late 2024.

The fourth plant, now being built by Taipower in Yenliao Township, New Taipei City, on Taiwan’s northeastern coast at an estimated cost of over nine billion dollars, has been bitterly opposed by a majority of local residents, environmental activists and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The former DPP government had briefly suspended construction of ‘Nuclear Four’ in October 2000, but this decision was overruled by the KMT-controlled national legislature in February 2001 after which construction resumed.

In the wake of the Fukushima crisis, environmental activists and DPP legislators reissued calls for a revaluation of the use of nuclear power and a suspension of construction of ‘Nuclear Four’.

“Countries that are more advanced or more backward than Taiwan are cautiously reviewing their nuclear power policies, but our government is acting like an ostrich and maintaining that everything is safe,” DPP Legislator Huang Wei-cheh told IPS.

Senior government officials and spokespersons for the state-owned Taipower have issued assurances of the safety of the existing facilities and the design of ‘Nuclear Four’.

Speaking at a cabinet news conference Mar. 17, Atomic Energy Council Director-General Tsai Hung-chun assured citizens that his agency would not approve loading of fuel into ‘Nuclear Four’ until all 66 critical systems passed inspection.

Moreover, Wu explained that the plant’s emergency power supply had greater redundancy than the Fukushima plant thanks to two 40 megawatt oil-fuelled gas turbines and an emergency four megawatt diesel generator that could power water cooling systems for the reactors.

If these systems and the plant’s emergency core cooling system malfunctioned, Wu stated that there was also a 100,000 ton fresh water reservoir above the facility that could flood the reactors through gravity if power systems failed.

However, the tour also revealed possible blind spots.

A brochure on the Chinshan facility acknowledged five possible threats to the plant’s safety – fire, internal incidents, seismic shocks, floods and typhoons. Furthermore, the storage pool for cooling spent fuel rods – similar to the one in the troubled Fukushima facility – lies outside the nuclear reactor vessel, and thus outside the protection of the emergency water reservoir.

Under questioning in Taiwan’s national legislature Mar. 17, Taipower Chairman Chen Kui-ming told KMT Legislator Chen Chieh that the state- owned power company would “study the Fukushima experience” and make safety improvements.

According to DPP Legislator Tien Chiu-chin, the ‘Nuclear Four’ project suffers from a long list of concerns, including over 700 arbitrary design changes without GE’s permission, insufficient earthquake protection to withstand a seven magnitude earthquake, proximity to recently discovered active undersea volcanoes and faults. She also said the plant is suffering from poor management by Taipower, which is directly managing construction, unlike the previous plants which were supervised by GE and Westinghouse.

Civic confidence in the crisis-management capabilities of the government and Taipower is low. A poll of 1,202 on Mar. 14 found that 55 percent lacked confidence in the safety of Taiwan’s nuclear power plants, compared to 29 percent who had confidence.

In addition, 65 percent of the respondents said that they had little or no confidence in the KMT government’s crisis response capability, compared to 21 percent who trusted the government’s crisis management skills.

A survey of 1,112 Taiwan adults conducted by the DPP released Mar. 17 showed that 76.5 percent agreed that construction of ‘Nuclear Four’ should be suspended pending a comprehensive review of its safety design and engineering quality, while 18.6 percent disagreed.

Public opinion was split on Ma’s statements that “nuclear power plants in operation did not need to cease operating”.

DPP Public Survey Department Director Chen Chun-lin stated that, “as the public has a high degree of doubt about nuclear safety, President Ma should not have rashly issued such an important announcement but should first listen to the public will and carefully reconsider.”

Meanwhile, residents and environmentalists are mobilising to launch a renewed drive to halt ‘Nuclear Four’.

Over 100 Yenliao residents held a rally in front of the Executive Yuan (Cabinet) building in Taipei on the morning of Mar. 17 to call on the Ma government to “cease the extremely risky nuclear power development policy”.

Yenliao Anti-Nuclear Self-Help Association spokesman Wu Wen-tung stated that, “the problem is not how many spare generators a plant has or how many metres high its anti-tsunami sea wall is, but the reality that nuclear power is a highly risky system that science and technology still cannot fully control.”

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Feb 5 2011 (IPS)

Revelations that an Air Force private had apparently been wrongfully executed 15 years ago for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl have reopened the debate over Taiwan’s retention of the death penalty.

Taipei District and Taichung District prosecutors announced Jan. 28 that after a new investigation into the case, another former Air Force enlisted man had confessed to the crime.

The announcement prompted President Ma Ying-jeou to apologise to the mother of then 21-year-old Air Force private Chiang Kuo-ching, who was convicted for the crime and executed by gunshot in 1997. Ma also promised “to use the swiftest legal procedure” to clear Chiang’s name and make reparations.

Chiang’s father, Chiang Chih-an, had waged a decade-long campaign to clear his son who, human rights lawyers maintained, had been tortured into making a false confession.

The father, however, did not live long enough to hear the prosecutors’ finding. He died less than a month after the Control Yuan, Taiwan’s watchdog agency, ordered the Ministry of National Defence (MND) to reinvestigate the case in 2010.

Lin Hsin-yi, executive director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP), told IPS the prosecutors’ finding “will definitely have an impact” on the debate on the death penalty.

That debate appeared to have been closed after Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) government executed four death row inmates, all of them convicted of kidnap-murders, on April 30, 2010.

The executions ended a 52-month tacit moratorium imposed by the previous government under the Democratic Progressive Party.

The orders for the executions had been signed by new Justice Minster Tseng Yung-fu, a former prosecutor appointed by KMT Premier Wu Den-yi in late March.

Tseng replaced former justice minister Wang Ching-feng, who had resigned in the wake of a political furore caused by her declaration she would refuse to sign execution orders.

“Many people still support the death penalty because they do not believe that judges or prosecutors can make wrongful judgments, but the Chiang case proves otherwise,” said TAEDP’s Lin.

In their report, the Control Yuan commissioners found that then Air Force Political Warfare Headquarters Commander Chen Chao-min had violated the Military Trial Law by permitting Air Force counterintelligence agents without status as judicial officers to conduct the murder investigation.

These agents extracted a confession from Chiang after 37 hours of constant interrogation and torture.

The Control Yuan commissioners also said that during Chiang’s military trial, Chen had failed to consider the fact that the defendant had recanted and declared that his confession had been extracted through torture.

Chen, who was appointed defence minister in Ma’s first Cabinet in May 2008, was also found to have violated Chiang’s human and judicial rights by rushing his conviction and execution.

The Control Yuan turned the report over to the Office of the Chief Public Prosecutor for investigation and demanded corrective action from the MND.

The Control Yuan also demanded a retrial or a special appeal trial by the Supreme Military Court, and demanded the return of the sizable rewards given to the officers who “broke” the case.

Following a review of forensic evidence, prosecutors announced that another Air Force enlisted man, Hsu Jung-chou, was now their prime suspect.

Hsu had served two prison terms on similar offences committed in 1996 and 2003, and had confessed to the murder during questioning by Taichung District prosecutors.

On Jan 29, the MND issued a statement that appeared to defend its failure to indict Hsu. The next day, however, the MND admitted “there had definitely been shortcomings” in the handling of the case and “solemnly” issued “the most sincere apology” to the Chiang family.

The MND later said it asked the Taipei District Prosecutors Office to provide the Ministry with new evidence on the case. The MND said it would apply for a retrial on Chiang’s behalf and anticipated that proceedings could be completed within six months.

The defence ministry also asked the prosecutors to investigate the officers suspected of “using torture to illegally extract” a confession from Chiang.

Judicial Reform Foundation Executive Director Lin Feng-cheng told IPS the retrial would serve as the legal foundation for the pursuit of reparations. It would also serve as basis to hold former Air Force and defence ministry officials criminally liable for the miscarriage of justice.

Nevertheless, a poll released by the National Chung Cheng University Crime Research Centre revealed what the JRF’s Lin called a “split personality” in Taiwan public opinion.

According to the poll, released one day before prosecutors announced their findings on the Chiang case, nearly 78 percent of respondents expressed doubt over the competence of both judges and prosecutors in handling criminal cases.

But more than half, or 59 percent, indicated they totally opposed the abolition of the death penalty, while nearly 30 percent said they would only approve “with complementary measures,” and only 2.2 percent said they advocated direct abolition.

The JRF’s Lin observed that the mainstream media has treated the Chiang Kuo-ching case as an individual ‘mistake’ involving only the military court system.

“After the justice system has taken remedial action, I believe the questions of institutional change, namely whether the military court system should continue to exist and whether the death penalty should be retained, will resurface,” the JRF’s Lin stated.

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Jan 31 2011 (IPS)

A coalition of journalist and civic organizations is waging a campaign to rid the Taiwan media of government propaganda masquerading as news, and signs are that the campaign has taken “the first steps” towards victory.

The coalition said it will continue protesting government’s practice of “news buying” and the sharp rise in “embedded advertising” by agencies of the People’s Republic of China.

In mid-January, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan amended the Budget Law to prohibit the use of government funds to “buy” news. The government also issued an executive order requiring that official policy explanations in media “be identified as advertisements and news as news.”

These measures came in response to protests by media and civic groups against the improper classification of government advertisements promoting its policies and programmes in the media.

“The sources of such ‘reports’ are left deliberately vague and terms like ‘special section’ or ‘supplement’ are used to make it hard for readers to tell whether they are news or advertisements,” said Taiwan Rural Front spokeswoman Lin Lexin.

The controversy comes amid Taiwan’s decline in a survey on news freedom around the world conducted by the democracy watchdog Freedom House. In 2008, Taiwan placed first in Asia, but fell to eighth place last year. Taiwan also ranked 23rd globally in 2008, falling to 47th last year.

In December, concerned media and civic groups formed the Alliance to Oppose Government News Buying, composed of the Alliance for Taiwan Journalists (ATJ), the Taiwan Media Watch (TMW) and other media monitoring groups.

These groups came together following the resignation of senior China Times reporter Dennis Huang Cheh-pin, who also wrote an emotional message protesting government embedded advertising and news buying by private enterprises.

Also in the wake of Huang’s appeal, 130 journalism and broadcasting professors signed a petition against “government news buying,” while 200 human rights, environmental, social and civic reform organizations issued a statement of support.

Advertising and propaganda in the guise of news has long been one of the most serious problems in Taiwan media. But this practice, referred to as “news buying” or “embedded advertising,” has drawn protests from civic groups because of the extent to which taxpayer funds are used.

A report by the media monitor Foundation for the Advancement of Media Excellence released January 24 cited 378 examples of “government news buying” in Taiwan newspapers in 2010. The number excludes “special reports” or television or radio “advertorials”.

The report said the 2010 figure was more than double that of 2009. It cited as examples bylined special reports promoting “rural revitalization”, the necessity for an eighth naphtha cracker complex, and the safety of nuclear power. Another example was the report defending President Ma Ying-jeou’s campaign to sign an “economic cooperation framework agreement” with mainland China.

Also included in last year’s figure are 119 examples of advertising by agencies of the People’s Republic of China, such as provincial and city governments, state industrial zones and official investment promotion agencies.

Among these were three full pages of “special reports” promoting China’s Shaanxi Province in the vernacular China Times daily newspaper on September 13, 2010. The publication coincided with the arrival of PRC Acting Shaanxi Governor Zhao Zhengyong and a major business delegation on a seven-day visit.

In December, the Alliance to Oppose Government News Buying demanded that government and political parties cease embedded advertising and news buying. It also called for amendments to laws on the budget, government procurement, civil service, and satellite, radio and television broadcasting to explicitly ban the use of central or local government funds for any form of embedded advertising.

The alliance also demanded full implementation of the Government Information Freedom Act.

On Jan. 13, the Legislative Yuan approved a revision to the Budget Law requiring that “policy guidance” statements by government agencies, state enterprises or government-backed foundations be clearly identified as “advertisements.” The amendment also banned the use of government funds to “buy” news.

Mainland Affairs Council Vice-Chairman Liu Teh-hsun said embedded marketing by PRC agencies was also banned in the wake of the revisions to the Budget Law.

“It is important for the government to respond to new expectations in society,” Government Information Office Minister Johnny Chiang Chi-cheng told IPS.

Reacting to criticisms the revisions were inadequate, Chiang said the amendments to the Budget Law were “a first step,” but that “in legislating laws regarding matters such as freedom of speech or news freedom, it is necessary to take some time and have comprehensive consideration.”

“We have still seen examples of apparent government embedded advertising since Premier Wu Den-yih issued the government’s new guidelines and will need to see how much restraint they exercise on government agencies,” said ATJ President Yang Wei-chung.

Yang added that the revision to Article 62 of the Budget Law was “too loose” and noted that it only restricted the activities of foundations that were more than 50 percent state-owned. Yang said the alliance wanted the prohibition to apply to foundations which received 5 percent or more of their funding from the government, and that stronger legal action was needed.

Citizen Congress Watch Executive Director Ho Tsung-hsun said the alliance and supporting civic groups still planned to organize a march in Taipei on March 20 to “oppose buying of news by the government” and launch a mass movement against “the distortion of the media environment.”

The alliance also urged news media owners to “set self-disciplinary guidelines,” publicly indicate the sources of government advertising, and “cease demanding that reporters engage in business cooperation activities.”

“The fundamental issue remains whether the Taiwan news media itself can uphold journalistic professionalism and autonomy and the principle of ‘not selling’ news to either government or business interests,” said FAME Executive Director Lu Shih-hsiang.

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Nov 22 2010 (IPS)

The Taiwanese government’s plans to partially decriminalise the sex trade has revived deep divisions within society, including between advocacy groups who stress the need for equal treatment and ‘autonomy’ for sex workers and those worried about the impact of such a move on human trafficking and child prostitution.

After years of debate, Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT) or Chinese Nationalist Party government has been presented with a deadline to at least partially resolve the thorny issue of decriminalising the sex trade, which in Taiwan encompasses over 80,000 sex workers and hundreds of thousands of ancillary jobs, activists say.

The deadline was set by a Nov. 6 declaration by Taiwan’s Constitutional Court, which found unconstitutional an article in the Social Order Maintenance Act that punishes sellers of sexual favours but not their purchasers. It said the act violated the principle that “all citizens shall be equal before the law” and required it to be expunged or revised by Nov. 6, 2011.

On Oct. 13, Interior Minister Jiang Yi-huah announced that two public hearings and two closed seminars among government agencies and scholars had reached a consensus to “eliminate punishment” for consensual sexual transactions among adults, but also concurred that “it would not be suitable to commercialise or turn it into an industry”.

Moreover, Jiang said that the majority of opinions were against restricting the sex trade to “exclusive zones” but preferred allowing local governments to regulate it in areas that “would not affect juvenile or child development”.

The government could consider permitting sex workers to operate “in cooperatives of three to five persons”, adding that the majority opinion believed that the forming of “corporations” or “enterprises” around sex work would be “inappropriate”, Jiang said.

Jiang said the Ministry of Interior would carry out a survey on its proposals and would hold another seminar among government agencies and academics to hammer out a consensus package to be presented to a Cabinet-level human rights advisory commission later this year.

The Cabinet is expected to send draft changes to the law criminalising sex work for approval by the legislature in early 2011.

But although the ruling KMT has a two-thirds majority in Taiwan’s national legislature, passage is far from assured due to sharp divisions among lawmakers and women’s rights, welfare and activist groups on the issue.

The Alliance Against Exploitation of Women, composed of 14 women’s and children’s rights groups, decried the interior ministry’s plans in an Oct. 22 statement.

Calling the decriminalisation plans “legitimising” the sex trade, it warned against the adoption of a regulatory model similar to the ‘one room, one phoenix’ pattern or one- person brothels in Hong Kong.

The alliance said the interior ministry’s preliminary consensus failed to address the Constitutional Court’s call for government agencies to “use vocational training, employment guidance and other educational measures to enhance the work skills and economic situation of sexual workers so that they do not need to resort to sexual work in order to survive”.

Without a clear consensus, “the government should not rush to decide on a final policy by the end of this year,” said a spokeswoman for the alliance.

Decriminalisation would make it harder to enforce laws on juvenile prostitution or human trafficking, Ingrid Liao Pi- jing, East Asia board representative of End Child Prostitution Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT International), told IPS.

“How will law enforcement agencies be able to determine whether such transactions are truly consensual or whether the sex workers are underage?” she asked.

Under legislative questioning on Nov. 2, Premier Wu Den- yih assured that the government had no intention to “develop sex trade as a normal trade”. But while he wished to see “a world without prostitution”, he said, “the government must pragmatically face social reality.”

While those opposed to decriminalisation find it too radical, those campaigning for the rights of sex workers find the interior ministry’s proposals too tame.

Taiwanese society should look into regulating the sex trade instead of trying to suppress it, said Chung Chun-chu, secretary-general of the Collective Of Sex Workers And Supporters (COSWAS). “We hope that sexual transactions can be entirely decriminalised and become a normal occupation, but the first phrase should focus on how to give power back to the sex workers,” said Chung.

Because sex workers cannot get clients legally, “the vast majority have no choice but to depend on bosses or procurers to gain clients and protection from police,” explained Chung. “Only 10 percent operate individually as either the highest-class courtesans or the poorest streetwalkers,” added Chung.

Chung said that if sex workers could legally form small cooperative studios, they would be more able to both protect themselves from “bad” clients and “reverse this power relationship and hire their own managers, drivers and security guards.”

Awakening Foundation Chairwoman Yang Wan-ying told IPS that “the changes to the Social Order Maintenance Act will only concern consensual sexual transactions.”

“Prohibitions and heavy criminal penalties for non- consensual sex or juvenile or child prostitution and the prevention and prohibition of human trafficking are still on the books and should be firmly enforced,” Yang said.

Both advocates and opponents of the decriminalisation of the sex trade agree that much more consensus building is required.

“The MOI (Ministry of Interior) has basically formulated its policies behind closed doors,” related Chung. “Many people have concrete worries and imagined issues and two public hearings and closed-door seminars do not constitute sufficient social dialogue”.

While supporting decriminalisation in principle, opposition Democratic Progressive Party legislator Yeh Yi- chin said: “We need to have a thorough and open public discussion on this issue and the alternatives.”

Excerpt:

By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Oct 22 2010 (IPS)

Activists here are calling for the use of democratic mechanisms and enhanced transparency to “hedge” risks posed to Taiwan by a series of agreements negotiated between Taipei and Beijing.

Since taking office in May 2008, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou has been practising ‘paper diplomacy’ in a drive for ‘reconciliation’ with the government of mainland China, across the Taiwan Strait, after over a decade of tensions.

Since then, more than 12 pacts – including the controversial Cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) – have been inked by Taipei and Beijing. This December, yet another round of document signing, this time on investments and medical cooperation, is expected to take place between representatives of the two governments.

So far, the tactic seems to have worked at easing tensions across the strait.

However, while Ma and his government, led by the Kuomintang party, maintain that these agreements have accelerated bilateral trade, tourism, and investment flows, many Taiwan citizens are not comfortable with what they perceive as their negative side effects.

“In the wake of the signing of ECFA, the impact of the Chinese economy on Taiwan is not simply an abstract risk but is happening now and is promoting excessive economic dependence, worsening income distribution equity and eroding human rights standards,” says Taiwan Labour Front secretary general Son Yu-lian.

“We cannot ignore China,” he says, “but (we) should try to avoid excessive dependence on the Chinese economy and should also maintain basic standards of human rights, social justice and political democracy and transparency in our interactions with the PRC (People’s Republic of China).”

The Taiwan Labour Front is among the over 20 non- government groups that formed an alliance in July to boost civic participation and government transparency in the negotiation of pacts between Taiwan and China.

Indeed, the first major operation of the Cross-strait Agreement Monitoring Alliance (CSAMA) was to conduct a ‘citizen review’ of the ECFA, which was signed Jun. 29 by Taipei’s semi-official Strait Exchange Foundation (SEF) chairman Chiang Ping-kun and Beijing’s counterpart, Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) chairman Chen Yunlin, in Chongqing, China.

Despite the far-reaching nature of the free trade pact on Taiwan society, the ruling Kuomintang, which holds 74 of the legislature’s 112 seats compared to the opposition Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) 33, overrode calls for a thorough review of ECFA.

Instead, the KMT used its legislative majority to immediately refer the pact and accompanying legal revisions to a second reading, thus excluding the possibility of public hearings on the agreement.

“The Ma government’s handling of the process of consideration, negotiation and review of the ECFA fell far short of the requirements for full transparency and did not match the minimum requirements of a democratic system,” says alliance spokesman Lai Chung-chiang in an interview.

Nevertheless, the civic alliance organised a section-by- section review of the pact by civic groups and experts. It then submitted its findings to the legislative caucuses of the Kuomintang, the DPP and the non-partisan alliance, whose five lawmakers generally back the Kuomintang, and the public.

In a report released Aug. 11, the alliance raised a long list of issues with the ECFA.

Among other things, it called for the elimination of an article in the ECFA that authorised the organisation of a bilateral “joint cross-strait economic cooperation commission” and granted the commission the power to negotiate follow-on agreements that would not require legislative review or approval.

The alliance opposed the clause on the grounds that the arrangement would transfer government authority beyond the scope of legal accountability to Taiwan’s laws or citizen monitoring.

A statute for the handling of cross-strait relations with China had actually been promulgated in 1992 and revised in 2002. But Academia Sinica Institute for Legal Studies Associate Research Prof Max Huang Kuo-chang says the statute mandated the SEF only to negotiate “pragmatic” or “technical” issues with ARATS.

“The cross-strait statute did not foresee that the SEF would be negotiating major treaties or to be ‘delegated’ powers of government on a permanent basis,” he says.

The civic alliance report also called on Taiwan negotiators to propose new clauses in ECFA to ensure that the pact’s implementation would not undermine human rights, environmental protection, labour rights, and gender equality standards.

Corporate Social Responsibility Taiwan secretary-general Tseng Chao-ming said such clauses had already been incorporated into the preambles or as distinct clauses in previous free trade agreements signed by China, but have not been included in any of the cross-strait agreements so far.

The alliance has now trained its sights on the signing of the SEF and ARATS pact in December.

Says the alliance’s Lai: “These pacts should incorporate robust human rights guarantees including assurances for personal freedom and work rights in the investment guarantee agreement and clauses to ensure human rights protections in issues such as human participation in experimentation for new medicines.”

Lai warns that Beijing’s recent push for negotiations on the question of the withdrawal of over 1,600 missiles that the Chinese military has deployed opposite Taiwan indicates that cross-strait relations are entering an “even more complex period in which extremely sensitive issues such as military confidence-building measures or a highly political ‘peace agreement’ will be negotiated”.

He remarks, “Taiwan must have a legally mandated, democratic monitoring and review system with a high degree of democratic accountability and transparency in place before talks on such political issues begin.”

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By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Oct 10 2010 (IPS)

“We never want to see anyone else in Taiwan become a second Lu Cheng,” declared Lu Ching, referring to her younger brother whom she believes was wrongfully executed in September 2000 after being forced to confess to a kidnap-murder.

Lu issued the plea on Oct. 8, the first day of a three- day film festival called ‘Murder by Numbers’ which began with the screening of a documentary on this case. The festival was organised by the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) to mark World Day Against the Death Penalty on Oct. 10.

‘Formosa Homicide Chronicle II: The Case of Lu Cheng’, directed by Tsai Tsung-lung for Taiwan’s Public Television Service in 2001, chronicles the story of former police officer Lu Cheng, who was executed on Sep. 7, 2000 after being convicted of the kidnap-murder of a former high school classmate in Tainan City in 1998.

The conviction was based almost entirely on a confession obtained through a 36-hour interrogation by police.

Other films around the death penalty from Taiwan, Germany, India, Japan, Iran, France, Hong Kong and the United States were also screened at the festival.

The event took place amid several setbacks in rights campaigners’ efforts to secure the abolition of the death penalty in Taiwan, which has been in the criminal code since it took effect in 1935. Among these setbacks is the government’s breaking of what had been a 52-month moratorium on executions that the former Democratic Progressive Party government began in December 2005.

Since the Lu Cheng case, the quality of Taiwan’s police, prosecutors and judges and the implementation of criminal investigation procedures have “sadly not improved much”, says Lin Yung-sung, director of the Judicial Reform Foundation and former director of Taiwan’s Legal Aid Foundation.

“If this movie had been a Hollywood drama, the entire audience would have been applauding,” explained TAEDP Executive Director Ms Lin Hsin-yi, “but no one clapped their hands when it ended because everyone felt stunned and powerless.”

“Speeches, seminars and books are important, but movies like can present comprehensive stories that are direct and moving and easier understood and can plant a seed in a person’s mind and heart,” she added.

Taiwan’s moratorium on executions was ended by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) government of President Ma Ying-jeou on Apr. 30, with the execution of four death row inmates convicted of kidnapping and murder or multiple murders.

The execution orders were signed by Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu, a former prosecutor who replaced a predecessor, Wang Ching-feng, who resigned in March in the wake of a political furor over her public refusal to sign them.

The abolition movement suffered another setback when Taiwan’s Constitutional Court declined on May 28 to accept three petitions, filed by TAEDP on behalf of the then 40 remaining death row prisoners, that challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty.

The Court rejected TAEDP arguments that it conflicts with the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which had become part of Taiwan law in March 2009.

Prospects for change in Taiwan’s use of the death penalty are also clouded by President Ma’s appointment of conservatives as president and vice president of the judicial branch, and thus chairman and vice chairman of the Constitutional Court, for six-year terms.

Since May, four more people have been added to death row. Activists are also awaiting a Nov. 12 judgment by the Taiwan High Court on the ‘Hsichih Trio’ case, involving three people who were sentenced to death for the March 1991 murder of a couple in the Taipei suburb of Hsichih based almost entirely on their confessions.

Over the past 19 years, the trio, who said their confessions were extracted by torture in interrogation in August 1992, has had 11 retrials and three extraordinary appeals, becoming the focus of a global human rights campaign.

Earlier in May, Taiwan’s Justice Ministry cited opinion polls showing that 74 percent of adults oppose abolition as grounds for its policy to work for “the ultimate goal of abolishing the death sentence by gradually reducing (its) use” and formulating “complementary measures” to prepare for abolition.

In the meantime, the ministry said it would abide by the principle of “administration based on law” and implement death sentences confirmed by the Supreme Court.

Chief prosecutor Chien Mei-hui, director of a ministry special task force on the death penalty, told IPS that the committee was studying how the 2005-10 moratorium affected crime rates, possible substitutes for the death penalty, means to enhance protection for victims and other measures to prepare for eventual abolition.

For instance, Chien said the task force has reached “internal consensus” that “victim-less crimes”, notably drug trafficking, should not be subject to capital punishment.

But the Lu Cheng documentary shows that “the problem is not simply whether Taiwan should have the death penalty but whether the Taiwan judicial system is qualified to pass death sentence judgments”, said Judicial Reform Foundation’s Lin. ‘Formosa Homicide’ related the unsuccessful campaign by Lu’s sisters, Lu Ping and Lu Ching, to secure the tapes of his 36-hour interrogation to probe inconsistencies in the handling of the case.

The Tainan city police’s refusal to release the tapes “has made this a case in which it is impossible to find the truth”, says the film’s director Tsai Tsung-lung, now a communications instructor at National Chung Cheng University in the same county. “During the making of this film, we encountered shocking problems at each link in the judicial system that make it possible for such tragic cases to occur,” said Tsai.

But while she and her sister had been treated as troublemakers during their sit-in protests for their brother, Lu Ping recalled how one police guard at the legislature told her that “you two sisters are very brave and we are grateful to you as our superiors have told us that we must be more rigorous and cannot have another such case.”

Said Lu Ping: “As long as one person believes my brother is innocent, we believe that Taiwan’s justice has a chance for progress and that our pain has not been in vain.”

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By Dennis Engbarth
TAIPEI, Jul 22 2002 (IPS)

The abolition of the death penalty in Taiwan is not yet around the corner, but draft legislation that seeks to plug some of the law’s weaknesses marks no small step in the government’s efforts to get it out of the statute books eventually.

The proposed changes, contained in draft legislation approved by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led Cabinet on Jul. 11, would ban capital punishment for minors under 18 years of age and drop all mandatory death sentences.

They are part of the largest package of revisions to the island’s criminal code in 60 years, as well as one in a series of recent steps to prepare for the abolishment of capital punishment.

The elimination of the death penalty was a major campaign promise of DPP President Chen Shui-bian, a former human rights lawyer, legislator and former Taipei mayor whose inauguration two years ago ended nearly 55 years of rule by the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party of China).

The issue of abolition of the death penalty received attention in the 1990s due to a campaign by human rights and judicial reform groups for a retrial for the “Hsichih Trio,” three youths who alleged police torture in extracting confessions to a 1992 murder charge, for which they received death sentences. Their case is now being retried.

The number of executions has also dropped since the DPP-led government took office – from 24 in 1999, it fell to 17 persons and slid further to 10 in 2001. Three people were executed during the first five months of 2002.

On Dec. 10, 2000, President Chen commuted the death sentence and pardoned convict Su Ping-kun, who said that a confession to his alleged murder of an underground money lender had been extracted through torture by police.

In May last year, Justice Minister Chen Ding-nan declared that the DPP-led administration aimed to abolish the death penalty in three years or by the end of President Chen’s current term.

Since then, the government has eliminated mandatory death sentences for numerous felonies in the military or civil justice systems.

For example, Taiwan’s legislature approved in October revisions proposed by the Cabinet to the island’s military code of justice, thus reducing the number of offences liable for mandatory death sentences from 44 to two.

In January, the legislature also officially terminated the controversial ‘Anti-Hoodlum’ law, which authorised mandatory death sentences for a wide range of offences including kidnapping, gang robbery and other violent crimes.

The latest draft revisions to the criminal code would strike Article 63 of the code, which permits death or life sentences to be imposed on persons under 18 in grave crimes such as the murder of kidnapped persons or parents.

This clause contradicts the ban on the use of capital punishment on minors in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The draft revisions would also drop all mandatory death sentences and allow judges to choose between death or life imprisonment for the most serious crimes.

“The elimination of capital punishment for minors is an important step toward abolishing the death sentence,” said Kenneth H C Chiu, an attorney for Kew and Lord and a director of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR).

But Chiu told IPS that he was not optimistic that the government would be able to abolish the death penalty by May 2004, due to entrenched “psychological barriers” among Taiwan citizens.

Opinion polls by official and private agencies after the justice minister’s announcement in May last year indicated that more than 70 percent of the adult population in Taiwan, which has more than 22 million people, did not approve of an abolishment of the death penalty.

Efforts to persuade Taiwanese to accept an end to capital punishment may also be complicated by the 38 percent jump in violent crimes last year to 14,327 or 64.1 per 100,000, compared to 46.5 cases per 100,000 in 2000.

Even though the number of murders and kidnappings declined slightly, robberies, gang robberies and rapes rose 23 percent, 66 percent and 27 percent, respectively, in 2001.

Ordinary thefts soared 52 percent, probably reflecting last year’s sharp rise in the unemployment rate to an unprecedented 5.2 percent by December 2001.

In announcing the Cabinet proposals, minister without portfolio Hsu Chih-hsiung reaffirmed that abolition of the death penalty remains the goal of the DPP-led government, but acknowledged that “complementary measures must be implemented before most citizens could accept an end to capital punishment”.

Justice ministry officials say the revised criminal code would “use both tolerance and severity” to deal with the island’s rising crime rate.

The revisions would lower sentences for minor offences and expand the conditions for substitution of fines for prison time and for the use of suspended sentences. But they would boost the maximum penalty for a single serious crime from 15 years or 20 years for a repeat offender to 30 years and 40 years, respectively.

The Cabinet also wants to introduce the “three strikes” principle to repeat offenders of serious crimes. If approved, penalties for crimes carrying punishments of a minimum of five years in prison (such as murder, armed robbery, and kidnapping) would be hiked by 50 percent for a second offence and doubled for a third offence.

The package would also sharply hike the threshold of time served in life sentences to a minimum of 30 years for a first offender and 40 years for repeat offenders before possible release on parole.

Some politicians, like DPP legislator Chen Tang-shan, pointed out that “many people feel the term of sentences for violent or serious crimes are too light and that it is too easy for convicts to secure release on parole”.

“When I returned from the United States 10 years ago, I supported the abolishment of the death penalty, but after eight years of being responsible for public safety as mayor of Tainan county, I have changed my mind,” he explained.

“Even though legal or justice professionals are gradually coming to a consensus that capital punishment is not the best means to deter serious crime, most ordinary citizens are unable to accept an immediate abolishment of the death penalty,” said legislator Pang Chien-kuo of the conservative People First Party (PFP).

“Most people in Taiwan still believe that the death sentence deters violent crime, even if they agree that there should be stricter conditions on the application of capital punishment,” said Pang, who personally supports the removal of capital punishment.

But Chiu says that tightening of the laws may help reassure citizens. “By increasing maximum sentences and making it harder to gain early release, the draft revisions may reduce these kind of obstacles (to lifting the death penalty),” he said.

But Chiu added: “If the government really wants to abolish the death penalty, it must intensify educational efforts so that people can understand why so many countries have dropped it.”

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