Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Due to its unique international situation, Taiwan is often obliged to resort to all kinds of self-demeaning titles in its dealings with international entities or foreign countries, such as joining sports events as “Chinese Taipei” or calling its embassies “trade offices.”

Even with countries with whom it has diplomatic relations, Taiwan has to use the name “Republic of China” (ROC).

Taiwanese have long been subject to the ignominy of seeing their government have to accept these compromises. Given the rapidly changing international situation, Taiwan now has a rare opportunity to redress this injustice.

This author had the honor of being invited to attend the official online launch of the Transitional Justice Commission’s Taiwan Transitional Justice Database on Feb. 26.

The database has collated records of about 10,000 political victims from during the martial law era. It is the result of more than a year of gathering political archives, statistics and the names and numbers of those prosecuted; identifying the names, ranks and titles of the military judges and prosecutors at the trials; and assigning each a number so that they could be entered in the database.