International Exclusion

Taiwan is by no means the only country with an authoritarian legacy. To explain its human-rights infrastructure problems more fully, the consequences of international exclusion must be considered further.

When forced out of the United Nations in 1971, Taiwan was also cut off from the international human-rights regime. This was before the UN human-rights system became more effective with developments like the covenants on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. In the next 30 years, Taiwan never had to cast a vote on human-rights issues, and therefore there was no need for officials and international human-rights-law experts to handle the voting. For 30 years, Taiwan’s government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have never participated in the numerous conferences, projects, surveys, proposals, or drafts of human-rights conventions and declarations. The cumulative experience and knowledge that would have accrued from such participation is inestimable. Taiwan also never had to submit any national human-rights reports as required by the six major covenants and conventions, preparation for which would have required assistance from academics. The trained scholars would have stimulated human-rights research and teaching, which would have had important implications for other levels of education. Imagine how much opportune education and reporting of activities that type of experience would have offered the media and the general public in all those 30 years.

Is not human rights in its post-World War II formation as largely a UN project a form of international involvement in the parallel strengthening of human-rights infrastructure across countries? Yet Taiwan is unfortunate enough to have suffered the consequences of international exclusion, costing it much needed benefits of infrastructure building. Are not human rights supposed to be universal, indivisible, and, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “without distinction of any kind”?

Time for Action

Despite the injustice of international exclusion that geopolitics has brought upon Taiwan, we cannot afford to wait any longer in building our human-rights infrastructure if our country is to continue advancing in rights and freedoms. As a former human-rights lawyer and political prisoner, I believe that the best solution would be a constitutional revision that would require any constitutional applications to conform to international human-rights covenants and standards. This amendment should be combined with certain human-rights institution-building measures.

Unfortunately, given the current dynamics of domestic party politics, constitutional revision would be extremely difficult, but the idea underlying my administration’s current human-rights policies and measures remains the same: Taiwan does have “the sovereign right to become less sovereign,” to borrow the elegant phrasing of Northwestern University Law School Professor Douglas Cassel. Sovereignty remains crucial, but should not be absolute when it comes to matters such as human rights, the environment, and international peace. The government and people of Taiwan will abide by this civilizing principle and will recognize in time that what is right is often what is smart.

Since my inauguration, my administration has set up an Inter-Ministry Human Rights Committee to lay the groundwork for our vision. Half of the committee members are human-rights activists, human-rights lawyers, and legal scholars. The Committee is also in the process of forming an advisory group of domestic and international human-rights experts. The inclusion of international experts shows the crucial need for international assistance to complete this most important task.

Exactly because of the infrastructure problems and the underlying causes our current policies and measures are designed to overcome, their implementation will face numerous difficulties, but we intend to persevere. In so doing, we will build our young democracy into one richer in human-rights content. It is also a way of reminding the world that Taiwan, despite its international exclusion, is nevertheless still part of the global village of human rights.