|
Capital punishment and the art of
hypocrisy
By Chiu Hei-yuan 瞿海源
Friday, Jun 11, 2010, Page 8
You would think that Taiwan had become the murder capital of
the world overnight if you were to believe the press in this country.
Driven by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義),
Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) and Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu
(曾勇夫), and encouraged by the Judicial Yuan, the campaign for the abolition of
capital punishment has been condemned without trial, case summarily dismissed
and the death sentence imposed. This is an utterly unacceptable state of
affairs.
The current environment fostered by our government, press-generated hysteria and
a sense of moral panic amongst the public as a whole is quite regrettable. As a
result, Taiwan has become mired in a conservative mindset preoccupied with
traditional Confucian values, prey to callousness and indifference to suffering.
Taiwan risks turning into a nation of irrational, clamoring, barbaric people
with no regard for human rights.
Over the last couple of months death penatly abolition advocates have been
subjected to slander after slander which, at times, has amounted to little more
than irrational demonization.
Most of this has come from uninformed, anti-intellectual quarters quite
ignorant of the direction the rest of the civilized world is moving in. Do they
believe EU countries such as the UK, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, along with all
the other countries in the world that have abolished the death penalty, are
simply pretending to care about human rights? Is there any veracity at all to
their claims that these countires would rather protect criminals than deal with
the feelings of victims families?
Must we really join the ranks of the other 18 countries — including China, North
Korea, Iran, Iraq and Yemen — that vigorously practice capital punishment?
It is wrong for the state to take the lives of people, just as it is wrong for
individuals to do so. To make such an assertion in no way implies that murderers
are innocent or that victims families should not be helped.
Ma, Tseng and Huang have consistently said that they see the abolition of the
death penalty as a goal and have even voiced their support for such a move. But
can they be taken at their word?
They appear all too willing to use capital punishment for political gain and
that makes me doubt whether their support is genuine or conditional on public
opinion polls. Up until this point, I have heard only arguments for why the
death penalty should be retained and precious little about why they personally
think it should be abolished.
Tseng has even asserted that it took European countries hundreds of years to do
away with the death penalty, failing to make clear precisely from which date we
plan to start counting. Is he suggesting that we should wait a century or two
before we do so?
It is sometimes hard to beleive that it has been more than 20 years since the
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) ended martial law and introduced democracy in
Taiwan. Both Ma and Tseng have said they favor abolition — do you believe them?
Because I don’t, not one bit. They talk, but do nothing about it.
The government maintains that it is executing criminals in accordance with the
law of the land, refusing to aknowledge that they are actually following two
laws, now defunct, that were promulgated during the martial law period. It’s
almost as if democracy never happened.
Chiu Hei-yuan is a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s
Institute of Sociology.
|
