Taiwan’s Constitutional Court has ruled that executions remain legal. For FDP human rights expert Renata Alt, the ruling is nevertheless “a step in the right direction.”
Taiwan’s Constitutional Court has the execution of the death penalty in the country declared it to be constitutional. In a decision announced on Friday, however, the Supreme Court restricted the death penalty to only be imposed for “particularly serious” crimes. What exactly this means remains unclear.
Although the right to life should be protected under Taiwan’s constitutional order, this protection is “not absolute,” said Hsu Tzong-li, one of the twelve judges involved in the ruling, according to the Taiwanese news agency CNAThe death penalty remains a “necessary” form of retribution for the crimes committed and has a “deterrent” effect, said Hsu. The lawsuit was brought by 37 people who are currently on death row.
Taiwan is one of the few Western-oriented countries that still retains the death penalty. According to the Taiwanese human rights organization Judicial Reform Foundation, there are currently 45 people on death row in the country, including eight whose sentences have been appealed. However, the number of executions has been declining for years, and the last death sentence was carried out in 2020. According to a report published in May, Opinion poll According to the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, almost 85 percent of respondents support the death penalty, while ten percent reject it.
“Taiwan’s restriction of the death penalty to the most serious crimes is progress”
“The fact that the Taiwanese Constitutional Court has restricted the use of the death penalty is a step in the right direction,” says Renata Alt (FDP), chairwoman of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid in the German Bundestag. “The fact that many countries describe the death penalty as a cultural tradition and have and apply it in ordinary criminal law violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law. That is why Taiwan’s restriction of the death penalty to the most serious crimes is progress,” said Alt. IPPEN.MEDIAShe herself has been fighting for the complete abolition of the death penalty in talks with Taiwanese diplomats and politicians “for several years”.
Taiwan’s ruling party, the DPP, also aims to abolish the death penalty in the long term. During the election campaign, President Lai Ching-te, who was sworn in in May, expressed his understanding that most Taiwanese wanted to keep the death penalty. A high level of public support is required for abolition, Lai said in a television debate at the end of December. The opposition KMT had previously accused the government of having effectively abolished the death penalty, as hardly any sentences were being carried out. A total of two people have been executed since the DPP took power in 2016. Under the previous KMT government, a total of 33 death sentences were carried out since 2008.
Fewer and fewer countries execute the death penalty
The fact that no people have been executed in Taiwan for years follows a global trend. According to the human rights organization Amnesty International, the death penalty was carried out in 16 countries last year, a historic low. However, these 16 countries executed more people than in almost ten years, according to Amnesty’s annual report on the worldwide use of the death penalty, published in May. Of the 1,153 executions recorded by Amnesty, most were carried out in Iran, where at least 853 people were executed. Saudi Arabia came in second with 172 executions.
However, the Amnesty report does not list executions in China, as the country has hardly made death sentences public for years. In the People’s Republic, “thousands of people were probably sentenced to death and executed” in 2023, the report states: “Amnesty International believes that the Chinese authorities have once again carried out more executions than the rest of the world combined.”
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