erupted not in mainland China but across the strait in Taiwan. In
January, the defense ministry there was forced to issue a public
apology for a wrongful execution in 1997, followed in early
March by
the execution of five prisoners without notifying their families.Advocacy groups decried the executions, the European Union expressed
its revulsion, and protests broke out. Taiwan’s leadership has
responded defiantly. In late March, President Ma Ying-jeou announced
that Taiwan would keep carrying out executions of death row inmates as
its laws mandate but that the government, which has reduced the use of
the death penalty, maintains a policy to phase it out through existing
laws and regulations—as in the recent replacement of mandated death
sentences with discretionary sentencing.
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| Taiwan’s former justice minister Wang Ching-feng (L) was replaced by former prosecutor Tseng Yung-fu (R) after she refused to carry out executions. |
An informal four-year moratorium on executions in Taiwan—no one had
been put to death since 2005—came to a swift but somewhat anticipated
end last year. In April 2010, Taiwan executed five inmates just days
after swearing in new Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu, a former
prosecutor whose strong support for capital punishment stood in sharp
contrast to his pro-abolitionist predecessor, Wang Ching-feng, a former
human rights lawyer who had been forced to resign when conservatives
from ruling Kuomintang objected to her refusal to consent to
executions.
While executions in Taiwan have sharply decreased since the early
1990s, the handling of capital crimes there has not always met basic
standards of human rights and criminal justice. For one, Taiwan does
not routinely inform family members of the condemned in advance of an
execution. Taiwan also lacks procedures for those under sentence of
death to seek a pardon or commutation—a right recognized under the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Taiwan has
legally agreed to implement.
Death Penalty Politics, Opinions & Laws
The global trend against capital punishment appears to be having
limited impact in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea—the three
industrialized Asian democracies with death penalty laws—where the
issue has generally been left to the discretion of a few officials.
Polls show that the public in all three places overwhelmingly wants to
retain the death penalty. Polling in Taiwan and South Korea has
revealed over 70 percent support for capital punishment, and results of
a 2010 survey show more than 85 percent of respondents in Japan favor
keeping it. In contrast, only small minorities support full abolition.
Although Korea has a state-issued moratorium and has had no executions
since 1997, a 2009 poll showed less than 20 percent in favor of
abolition. And the numbers are positively miniscule in Taiwan, where
only about 2 percent in a 2010 poll supported abolition.
Though considered “abolitionist in practice,” Korea still has a
staggering 110 crimes subject to the death penalty, or twice the number
as in China. In early 2010, Korea’s Constitutional Court deliberated
over capital punishment for the second time, ruling by a narrow 5-4
majority that the death penalty is constitutional. The previous ruling,
in 1996, upheld the legality by a wider margin of 7 to 2, so last
year’s decision may signify that Korea is moving closer toward
abolition.
There’s substantial political will in all three places to find a middle
ground that would effectively ban the death penalty without legally
abolishing it. Korea’s Ministry of Justice is thinking to replace the
death sentence with life without parole, and in late 2010, a justice
ministry task force in Taiwan made the same suggestion. Called a
“special life sentence” in Taiwan, it is as popular with the public
there as retaining the capital option. This past January, Japan’s new
justice minister, a long-time opponent of capital punishment, ordered
his staff to consider getting rid of the death penalty.
Some Common Ground with China
The death penalty, like any punishment, is subject to errors that
undermine its legitimacy. In Taiwan and Japan, prisoners on death row
have been exonerated and freed. Torture has been used to extract
confessions from innocent people who have later been executed, as seen
with the presidential apology in Taiwan. In such instances, it’s
possible to draw parallels between China and its neighbors. China has
also set death row prisoners free, admitted that innocent people have
been executed, and reassessed its death penalty practices; China has
made much of its increasingly “careful” use of capital punishment, and the Supreme People’s Court’s more stringent final review of death sentences has been credited in helping to reduce executions. (Read more
about wrongful convictions and executions in the US and China
in
Dialogue Issue 42.)
Even lawmakers in China and Korea—two countries at opposite extremes of
the spectrum of death penalty use—share a common problem: how to
decrease the huge number of crimes eligible for the death penalty. Even
if its efforts are more symbolic than substantive, China is actually
ahead of Korea in this regard. In February, China’s National People’s
Congress Standing Committee approved changes to the Criminal Law that
removed 13 crimes (among a total of 68) from death penalty eligibility.
Meanwhile, cutting down on capital offenses in Korea is only at a
discussion stage. Of the 110 crimes punishable by death, only 12 are
serious violent offenses. Many of the rest are political, economic,
ideological, and administrative crimes, and their status as offenses
punishable by death stands as a relic of Korea’s authoritarian past.
Besides some widely criticized executions in China, none in recent
times in that part of the world have been condemned as much as those in
Taiwan, where the current political environment holds little promise
for the 40 prisoners who remain on its death row. At least the
contested political process in Taiwan is likely to ensure that a
healthy public debate continues, a debate that will influence the fate
of capital punishment there and in Asia more broadly.