The United Nations Human Rights Committee decided to develop a General Comment on article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and call for input to provide relevant information to be taken into consideration by the Committee during the preparation of the first draft.
This concept note of Taiwan is provide to UN by TAHR. It was oringianly written in Chinese. The English translation was initially generated with the assistance of AI (Gemini 1.5 Flash, Google) and further refined by the author for technical accuracy.
Current Status of the Practice of Freedom of Association in Taiwan
Although Taiwan has undergone democratization, the legal framework and administrative habits inherited from the authoritarian era continue to deeply influence the government's attitude toward managing people's associations. Restrictions—such as the requirement of a minimum of 30 initiators and the mandate that administrative affairs must adhere to rigid formats—increase the administrative costs for general associations. Furthermore, in the labor sector, the power of the right to solidarity is constrained through institutional designs such as various union categorizations and high thresholds.
I. Major Regulations Related to Association in Taiwan (Broad Sense):
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Civil Associations Act (人民團體法): Regulates social associations (societal juristic persons). This is the primary form adopted by groups to obtain legal entity status.
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Foundations Act (財團法人法): Regulates foundations. It is fund-centric and has higher capital requirements.
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Labor Union Act (工會法): Regulates labor unions. It enables the exercise of the right to solidarity, the right to dispute, and the right to collective bargaining.
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Political Parties Act (政黨法): Regulates political parties.
II. Context of International Covenants
Since Taiwan unilaterally introduced the ICCPR and ICESCR in 2009 and initiated a localized international covenant review mechanism in 2013, the review of freedom of association—given Taiwan's democratic development—usually concentrates on the operation of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the exercise of the right to solidarity for unions. As party politics is typically discussed under the scope of democratic development, the following discussion on Taiwan's current status focuses on the restrictions regarding Social Associations (involving I-1 and I-2) and Labor Unions (involving I-3).
III. Statistics
The latest statistics on registered groups published by the Taiwan government (2024) are as follows:
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Occupational Associations (including Unions): 11,524
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Social Associations: 68,576 (This category increases by approximately 1,000 registered groups annually).
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Political Associations (Political Parties): 75
These numbers serve as an indicator of the extent to which the public exercises the freedom of association.
IV. Restrictions on Social Associations / Civil Associations
1. The Civil Associations Act requires 30 adult citizens to initiate a civil association.
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(1) Excessive Threshold: To meet the legal headcount requirement, groups often enlist a large number of "nominal members" who do not deeply participate in the group's operations. This increases the administrative workload and often leads citizens to engage in paperwork-only operations solely to satisfy administrative demands.
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(2) Restrictions on Youth: If citizens under the age of 18 wish to initiate or join a group, regulations require the consent of a legal agent. In reality, this suppresses the autonomy of adolescents, making it difficult for them to determine their own practice of association.
2. Overreach of Lower-Level Rules: Government management of associations is often dictated by lower-level regulations or administrative customs. However, these regulations or the operational practices of frontline civil servants may exceed the authorization granted by the parent law.
3. Harsh Conditions for Foreigners: Although there are no explicit legal prohibitions, administrative processes, forms, and the habits of handling personnel (which do not hold the status of law) frequently result in the rejection of information submitted by foreigners. Coupled with insufficient language translation for documents and the fact that foreigners often have smaller local social networks—making the 30-person threshold harder to reach—the freedom of association for foreigners is, in practice, difficult to realize.
4. Rigid Formalism: The law imposes rigid regulations on meeting formats, articles of association, organizational structure, and headcount. The vast majority of citizens must expend significant energy coping with these formal legal requirements, leaving civil society with little space to develop flexible or alternative forms of association.
V. Restrictions on Labor Unions
(1) Headcount Threshold: Like other civil associations, the Labor Union Act also requires 30 citizens to initiate a union.
(2) Classification and Regional Limits: Restrictions are placed on the three categories of unions—Corporate, Industrial, and Professional—as well as limits set on administrative regions. Coupled with long-standing restrictions on the right to dispute found in other regulations and administrative practices, the power unions can exert and their space for autonomous development are significantly curtailed.
(3) Alliance Restrictions: Alliances between unions across different administrative regions or industries are restricted.
(4) Public Servants: Civil servants are still prohibited from organizing unions; they are restricted to the Civil Servant Association Act, which narrows the scope of the right to dispute. There are also detailed restrictions, such as the prohibition against teachers forming corporate unions.
(5) Migrant Workers: Although foreign workers have the legal right to organize unions, they are constrained by the reality of blue-collar migrant worker contracts (maximum three-year terms requiring transfer). This easily impacts their work residency visas and, by extension, union operations. Combined with the unequal power dynamic between labor and management, foreign workers generally face greater difficulties in securing their rights through the right to solidarity.
