死刑槍聲 Taiwan Resumes Executions by hand gun

台灣：反死刑？
After an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty the Taiwanese government has resumed the executions of convicted criminals whose executions had been postponed. One of the executed had been "waiting" for his death for 11 years. A sad reminder of the infamous prison death corridors from the United States. Taiwan's Ministry of Justice announced Friday, April 4th that the execution of five convicted murderers had taken place on the preceding Thursday. The executions were authorized by Justice Minister Tseng Yung-fu. In a precisely orchestrated movement, the executions took place in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung's jails. Cynics might argue that the choice of places for the executions were calculated acts to pacify the families of victims all other Taiwan who had been clamouring for the deaths of convicted criminals. One man executed in Taipei's jail threw a Molotov Cocktail in a private school in Taoyuan County resulting in three deaths and 15 injured. The man in Taichung had been convicted of killing two drug dealers and leaving them by the wayside. The inmate in Kaohsiung had robbed and sexually assaulted several young women previously contacted over the internet. One of them was murdered and her body thrown into a river. The other criminal from Kaohsiung had murdered two prostitutes and two other women after breaking into their homes.
There are still 40 convicts on death row in Taiwan. While Taiwanese citizens might have expected the government to abolish the death penalty, it seems strange, if not politically motivated, that suddenly five convicts were executed being chosen at random. This has not prevented the Kuomintang from losing recent by-elections in Southern Taiwan to the benefit of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), favourable to independence). The DPP is against the death penalty.

Picture of activists opposing the Death Penalty 反死刑 from the Taiwanese Government official site

Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has explained that it will continue a dialogue with the European Union on the death penalty, a statement diplomatically empty and strangely reminiscent of similar declarations by China on human rights in international forums. Recently, the Chinese government has published a long list of offences that will no longer incur the death penalty.
The Taiwanese government has reasons to be nervous on the back of having received visa-free Shengen privileges for its citizens. The EU had begun to view Taiwan as being closer to its own values including a ban on the death penalty for any member country of the European Union. Pictures published on Taiwan's government site do show activists opposing its own policy. This is a clear sign that a free debate still continues within the government.
The fact that a majority of Taiwanese, at least 70%, are in favour of the death penalty will be viewed as a feeble excuse when many European countries removed the death penalty when a majority of their populations was in favour of it as a main deterrent against crimes. Once the death penalty had been removed, violent crimes did not show any significant increase. When the question is coupled with a proposal to replace the death penalty with life long imprisonment without parole, the figure was 49% in 2000 up to 56% in 2008.
Some hard decisions will have to be taken: either remove the death penalty or, maybe more annoying, remove the hundreds of place of names bearing the two characters 人權 (Human Rights) to be seen all over Taiwan.