| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 法律學研究所 === 96 === Transitional justice refers to a range of approaches that societies undertake to reckon with legacies of widespread or systematic human rights abuse as they move from a period of violent conflict or oppression towards peace, democracy, the rule of law, and respect for individual and collective rights. In other words, how to deal with many atrocities or unjust actions of dictatorship in the past is this article’s key point.
At first, Taiwan’s way of dealing with the past focus on compensation to victims. The truth-seeking was not enough and sweeping, only including the truth of victims.There were no trials to judge those responsible for deaths, torture, and illegall detentions. In short, Taiwan’s way of dealing with the past was similar to Spain’s model. Their ways of dealing with their repressive legacy has been often characterized as a deliberate agreement to ‘forget’ and ‘disremember’ the past. And bury the past through collective amnesia.
After realizing many countries’s ways of dealing with the past, this article also discusses the new direction of transitional justice. This article argues that first step of new direction of transitional justice is truth-seeking. Let the injured or their kindred tell the stories of suffering is very important. On the one hand, their injury and dignity will be recognized, on the other hand, their damages and traumas will be healed. Moreover, let other bystanders understand the cruelty of reality, it is tend to establishes the real historical memory. Socially, to preserve the record of historical experience is to post a public warning sign against the repetition of such injustice in the future. Spain is also recovering its memory. Therefore revealing, seeking and reflexing the truth is an inevitable current.
However, the most important direction of transitional justice is retribution. For victims, truth-seeking is insufficient to meet the myriad psychological needs individuals. The granting of amnesty to those responsible for deaths, torture, and illegall detentions is also generally at odds with the feelings of most survivors of violence. Ideally, these survivors want truth from the perpetrators, but they also want them retributed. Justice through retribution is the preferred way of dealing with survivors among victims. Without retribution, survivors’s often discontentedness will gradually become hatred. Inflicting reasonable retribution on perpetrators is to be contributive to human rights protection, social reconciliation and national future.
Finally, this article focuses on the necessity and feasibility of retribution. Criminal trial, one form of retribution, has no necessity and feasibility in principle. Because most perpetrators’s harmful actions are legal. And they are not responsible for their actions. Only in the wholly exceptional situation, criminal trial has the necessity and feasibility. As for vetting, another form of retribution, it has the necessity and feasibility. It has nothing to do with criminal responsibility. Because of the necessity and feasibility of vetting, this article addresses a recommendation of new direction of vetting.
The new direction of retribution that article addresses maybe become important reference about transitional justice in Taiwan.
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