Taiwan under fire over executions
Foreign experts invited to scrutinise island's compliance with UN human rights covenants
Taiwan's executions of six prisoners in December has prompted fresh criticism of the island's president, Ma Ying-jeou, and his government from international and domestic human-rights groups.
It would be Taiwan's first human-rights report on the implementation of the two United Nations covenants. But before the arrival of the experts - two of whom had written to Ma asking him to guarantee that no executions would be carried out before their visit - the Justice Ministry authorised the execution of six inmates on December 21.
Amnesty International condemned the "cold-blooded killing" and local rights groups accused Ma of making a mockery of his oft-stated commitment to protecting human rights and his repeated appeals for the mainland to do the same.
But while capital punishment is increasingly falling out of favour around the world, Taiwan remains a society in which the concept of "an eye for an eye" still prevails. The families of murder victims demand that killers be put to death so that their victims can rest in peace.
How to handle those on death row has been a vexing problem for Ma since he became president in 2008. He has long stressed the protection of human rights, including those of prison inmates. But he faces pressure from a majority of the public take a tough stand on crime.
Ma was first confronted by the dilemma in 2010 when his government faced the end of a four-year informal moratorium on the death penalty introduced by his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The following year, the issue turned into an even bigger controversy when the justice minister at the time, Wang Ching-feng, threatened to resign to avoid signing documents authorising the execution of five inmates in March that year.