A Year of Human Rights Covenants: Great Leap for Taiwan
(Extracts from the Chairperson’s Message, “Toward A Human Rights Paradigm: Setting up the Taiwan Human Rights Commission”)
It has been three years since the National Human Rights Commission (hereafter “the Commission” or the NHRC) was established. The concerted efforts of all our staff members made it possible to bring to you this first NHRC annual report. It also marked a new way of communication between the NHRC and society.
From the call for establishment of a NHRC by the civil society organizations in 1999 through the passage of the Organic Act of the Control Yuan National Human Rights Commission on December 10, 2019 to the establishment of the NHRC on August 1, 2020, it took 20 years of hard work to succeed. In compliance with the UN’s Principles Relating to the Status of National Human Rights Institutions (Paris Principles), the NHRC is the first of its kind among our government structure. Hence, neither the nature nor the duties of the Commission were well-known to the public at the beginning.
While COVID-19 was posing such threat and challenges to the whole world, we managed to accomplish various difficult tasks and to build our internal system through trials and errors. First, we issued a “NHRC Special Report on Foreign Fishermen’s Human Rights Situation”, which was of great concern to the international community and to urge the administrative departments to propose a fisheries and human rights action plan; we also were engaged in the process concerning the implementation of five international human rights covenants; then came the presentation to the constitutional court as an expert witness; lastly we embarked on a number of research projects, such as research on sexual assaults in children and adolescent’s placement institutions and campus, problems facing migrant workers in child-rearing, as well as the national preventive mechanism (NPM) pilot project. In the field of human rights education, we promoted measures in collaboration with schools and government agencies according to the UN’s World Programme for Human Rights Education.
In international liaison and cooperation, we have signed the agreement with the Expertise France and the French Office in Taipei and invited the French human rights advisor to give us professional advice. Furthermore, on December 10, 2022, the Human Rights Day, I led a delegation to France and Germany to visit their human rights institutions. These international exchanges and collaborations on human rights affairs were all unprecedented to Taiwan.
I was deeply moved and echo a Latin American poet that my most ardent wish is when the doorbell rings in the morning, it is the milkman instead of secret agents coming for me. To keep up with the rapid social development, however, we also need to confront the challenges from emerging human rights issues, such as the right to privacy by digital technology, the unfavorable impact of climate change, ethnic discrimination arising from social diversity, and others. Granted it is challenging, frustrating and unrewarding, we can turn it around using this opportunity to construct a human rights regime.
Please click the <https://reurl.cc/2z0j4X> to read our full report for more information and details.