Taiwan must not go back to death road
2010-03-12 12:00 AM
President Ma Ying-jeou has again displayed his lack of political leadership and courage by failing to stand up for Justice Minister Wang Ching-feng, a long time advocate of the abolishment of the death penalty, now that she has come under severe pressure for her firm stance not to implement death sentences.
Wang is not the first justice minister to refuse to sign death sentence orders as the current string of four years in which no death sentence has been executed began in 2006 under the former Democratic Progressive Party president Chen Shui-bian and then justice minister Shih Mao-lin.
When justice minister in 1997, Ma himself refused to sign order for the execution of the so-called "Hsichih Trio," three youths who charged that their confessions to a 1992 murder charge for which they received the death sentence had been extracted by police through torture.
The reasons for their actions include both the growing global consensus to abolish the death penalty as a "cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment" and to uphold the principle that "every human being has the inherent right to life."
Only 25 nations in the world, including the authoritarian People's Republic of China, now have the death penalty. Many states which still retain capital punishment in form no longer carry out death sentences, while numerous countries, including Great Britain, have abolished capital punishment even though a majority of the population still supports retaining the death penalty.
Although favoring the abolishment of the death penalty under the conditions of complementary measures such as a genuine life sentence without possibility of release, Chen's DPP government was unable to realize the complete abolishment of the death penalty since the Legislative Yuan was controlled by the rightist Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang).
After taking office in May 2008, Ma overcome the KMT's notorious lack of enthusiasm for human rights and first signed and then engineered legislative ratification of two major United Nations human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, into domestic law.
Since the spirit of the covenant is clearly against the death penalty, the process of adapting Taiwan's legal code to match the requirements of this overriding basic law offers an excellent opportunity to abolish the death penalty and bring Taiwan in line with the civilized standards of the global democratic community.
Unfortunately, Taiwan society remains dominated by the hoary and barbarian precept of vengeance and understandable but dangerously vindictive feelings of survivors of murder victims, which ultra-conservative KMT lawmakers are utilizing to stir a reactionary populist storm in order to turn the clock back on Taiwan's human rights progress.
The fuse was lit by Control Yuan Commissioner Chao Chang-ping and other colleagues who declared "orders for the death penalty should be approved by the justice minister and implemented within three days" and threatened to "investigate" Wang for "illegally" delaying executions.
No chance for 'correction'
Indeed, Article 127 of the Criminal Code mandates that public officials who do not implement legal punishments are liable for a sentence of up to five years, but this rule applies mainly to prosecutors or jail wardens and not to the justice minister who is not an "public official tasked with implementing punishment" but the chief of the highest administrative judicial agency.
Indeed, there is no article in the Criminal Code that explicitly requires the justice minister to sign such orders and it is evident that the justice minister is granted the "under the law" the discretionary power to sign or not to sign such orders.
Therefore, neither Wang or any other previous justice ministers who refused to sign death sentence orders have transgressed the law and indeed have honored the Constitution through their respect for all human life.
Another obstacle to dialogue lies in the professional bias of law enforcers, such as Wang Shih-ming, Ma's nominee for the post of chief public prosecutor, who told legislators that he advocated abolishment of the death penalty, but stated that existing death sentences should be implemented "according to law."
Such a statement reflects a blindness to the reality that a past error made by the judicial system in sentencing an innocent person to death cannot be "corrected" after his or her execution.
Concerns that innocent lives may be taken away with no chance of "correction" are especially high in Taiwan given the poor awareness of basic criminal procedures and human rights principles among the police and even prosecutors or judges and richly documented reports of "confessions" extracted by torture or trickery and numerous cases of the simultaneous apprehension of "murderers" by police in different localities.
There are innumerable reasons why Wang Ching-feng, who has incessantly displayed her ignorance of human rights and judicial human rights, is unsuitable for the post of minister of justice, but she should absolutely be cashiered for refusing to abrogate 44 human lives.
The dismissal of a justice minister, however incompetent, for supporting abolishment of the death penalty would mark a major reversal in our human rights and make Taiwan "into an international joke" and tear the last fig leaf of civilization from the KMT regime.
