COR Point 81 Follow up
The panel of international human rights experts recommended that the Taiwan government “undertake a follow-up review.” We affirm that the Presidential Office Human Rights Consultative Committee and its procedural affairs section have, in a very short period of time, convened 22 “follow-up meetings on the preliminary response to the Concluding Observations and Recommendations meetings by each agency.” In addition, we supported the appeal by civil society organizations for an additional 28 public hearings regarding controversial issues. In response to the 81 Concluding Observations and Recommendations, the Presidential Office Human Rights Consultative Committee itself has formed four teams responsible for research and study regarding a national human rights institution, education and training, human rights evaluation systems and law and regulation re-examination, respectively.
However, we must point out that the above-mentioned official actions still have many structural problems and shortcomings. First, the Taiwan government has yet enacted a “national human rights action plan” based on the specifications recommended by the United Nations to face and handle the 81 Concluding Observations and Recommendations issued by the international human rights experts. Therefore, even if the government has within a short period of time intensely convened so many meetings, the level of the government representatives has mainly been only at the working level. As a result, it has been difficult to engage in policy discussions, especially on the many issues that require cross-ministerial coordination such as forced evictions, the provision of health and medical care in prisons or exploitative conditions faced by migrant fishing boat crew. As the participating government representatives confine themselves to speaking for their own agencies or departments, it is difficult to hold focussed discussion on core issues.
Furthermore, the teams formed by the Presidential Office Human Rights Consultative Committee were primarily active in 2013-2014 and afterward did not make any progress. The only exception was the team concerned with the review and re-examination of laws and regulations, but even this team held its final meeting in October 2015 and announced that it had completed its immediate tasks and would not carry out any further follow-up activities. In fact, there are many issues raised by these 81 Concluding Observations and Recommendations that merit further follow-up. These include the establishment of a national human rights commission and the questions of how to handle other international human rights covenants and conventions that have not yet been incorporated into domestic law, how to encourage judicial officers to be more willing to cite the standards of the covenants, how to correct the problems of the lack of transparency and the right of participation of the persons influenced in government policy making. No less significant are the questions of how to ensure the right of truth through the promotion of transitional justice, how to implement the right of self-governance for indigenous peoples and the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, how to raise the female labour participation rate, how to end the super-exploitation of migrant fishing boat workers, how to ensure equal employment for physically or mentally disabled persons and other issues related to labour unions, marriage immigrants and stateless persons, forced evictions and expropriations all across Taiwan, the government’s continued execution of death penalties, discrimination suffered by LGBTI persons, access to health and medical care in prisons and judicial reform. In the past four years, numerous new human rights issues have surfaced in Taiwan (please refer to the Shadow Report on the two covenants). All of these problems require cross-ministerial and policy level follow-up and disposition by the Taiwan government through a “national human rights action plan” during whose implementation persons whose rights are affected must participate in discussions and decision-making.
Therefore, we recommend that, after the completion of the review of the Second State Report on the two covenants, the Taiwan government must respond to the concluding observations and recommendations with a four-year “national human rights action plan” formulated and implemented by the Executive Yuan to resolve problems step by step and implement the stipulations of the recommendations made by the review committee and the two covenants.