Torture by Police, Forced Disappearance & Other Ill Treatment In the early years of the 21st Century, 2000 to
2025 gvnet.com/torture/Taiwan.htm
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CAUTION: The following links
have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in Taiwan. Some of these links may lead to websites
that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or even false. No
attempt has been made to validate their authenticity or to verify their content. HOW TO USE THIS WEBPAGE Students If you are looking
for material to use in a term-paper, you are advised to scan the postings on
this page and others to see which aspects of Torture by Authorities are of
particular interest to you. You might
be interested in exploring the moral justification for inflicting pain or
inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment in order to obtain critical
information that may save countless lives, or to elicit a confession for a
criminal act, or to punish someone to teach him a lesson outside of the
courtroom. Perhaps your paper might
focus on some of the methods of torture, like fear, extreme temperatures,
starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, suffocation, or immersion in freezing
water. On the other hand, you might
choose to write about the people acting in an official capacity who
perpetrate such cruelty. There is a
lot to the subject of Torture by Authorities.
Scan other countries as well as this one. Draw comparisons between activity in adjacent
countries and/or regions. Meanwhile,
check out some of the Term-Paper
resources that are available on-line. ***
ARCHIVES *** 2020 Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices: Taiwan U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, 30 March 2021 www.state.gov/reports/2020-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/taiwan/
[accessed 9 August
2021] TORTURE AND OTHER
CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT The law stipulates
no violence, threat, inducement, fraud, or other improper means should be
used against accused persons, and there were no reports officials employed
these practices. Freedom House
Country Report 2020 Edition freedomhouse.org/country/taiwan/freedom-world/2020 [accessed 115 May
2020] F2 - DOES DUE PROCESS
PREVAIL IN CIVIL AND CRIMINAL MATTERS? Constitutional
protections for due process and defendants’ rights are generally upheld, and
police largely respect safeguards against arbitrary detention. Although
prosecutors and other law enforcement officials have at times engaged in
abusive practices, particularly in prominent and politically charged cases,
such violations have been less common in recent years. Taiwan: Grant
retrial to death row inmate tortured to confess Amnesty International AI, 9 June 2015 www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/06/taiwan-grant-retrial-to-death-row-inmate-tortured-to-confess/ [accessed 15 January
2019] Chiou Ho-shun described
being blindfolded, tied up, forced to sit on ice, subjected
to electric shocks with an electric baton and having water mixed with pepper
poured into his mouth and nose during questioning. The interrogations lasted
up to 10 hours at a time, with five or six people beating him to the point
where he repeatedly lost consciousness. The case is one of
Taiwan’s most protracted criminal legal cases, with repeated appeal hearings
over the past three decades, in which parts of the forced confession have
continued to be permitted as evidence in court. No material evidence linking Chiou Ho-shun to the crimes has ever been presented. In August 2011,
Taiwan’s Supreme Court had confirmed Chiou Ho-shun’s death sentence, after all appeals had been
exhausted. However, based on the new testimony from the police officers, Chiou Ho-shun’s lawyers can now
lodge a motion for a retrial. Although Chiou Ho-shun has repeatedly
claimed he retracted his confession immediately after his interrogation in
1988, prosecutors have previously said Chiou
Ho-shun only withdrew it at a later date. AMNESTY
INTERNATIONAL From an old article -- URL not available Article was
published sometime prior to 2015 DEATH PENALTY - On 31 August, after
21 years of litigation, the High Court reconfirmed a “not guilty verdict” and
freed the “Hsichih Trio”. Other death penalty cases
similarly involving torture and forced confessions remained unresolved. Search … AMNESTY
INTERNATIONAL For more
articles:: Search Amnesty
International’s website www.amnesty.org/en/search/?q=taiwan+torture&ref=&year=&lang=en&adv=1&sort=relevance [accessed 15 January 2019] Scroll
Down ***
EARLIER EDITIONS OF SOME OF THE ABOVE *** Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, March 8, 2006 www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61606.htm [accessed 13
February 2013] 2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61606.htm [accessed 7 July
2019] TORTURE
AND OTHER CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT – The law
stipulates that no violence, threat, inducement, fraud, or other improper
means shall be used against accused persons; however, nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) asserted that police occasionally physically abused
persons in their custody. The primary responsibility for investigating
torture and mistreatment lies with prosecutors. The Control Yuan, a coequal
branch of the political system that investigates official misconduct, also investigates
such cases. The law allows
suspects to have attorneys present during interrogations, primarily to ensure
that abuse does not take place (see section 1.d.). The Ministry of Justice
(MOJ) stated that each interrogation is audiotaped or videotaped and that any
allegation of mistreatment is investigated, and that police are subject to
severe punishment for abusing their authority in arresting or detaining
suspects or using threats of violence to extract evidence. There were no
reports of police convicted of abusing suspects. Some lawyers and legal
scholars asserted that abuses occurred in local police stations where
interrogations were not recorded and when attorneys were not present. The Criminal Code
provides that criminal charges must be based on legally obtained evidence and
that confessions, whether by defendants or
accomplices, unsupported by other evidence shall not be sufficient to convict
defendants; confessions alleged to be illegally obtained must be investigated
before proceeding to other evidence. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT
ARTICLES. Cite this
webpage as: Patt, Prof. Martin, "Torture by Police, Forced Disappearance
& Other Ill Treatment in the early years of the 21st Century-
Taiwan", http://gvnet.com/torture/Taiwan.htm, [accessed <date>] |
