Taipei, Aug. 31 (CNA) Scholars discussing transitional justice agreed in a seminar Thursday that while transitional justice should have arisen out of a non-partisan campaign, electoral politics and the media have become necessary means of pursuing those ends.
"Transitional justice in Taiwan should have been built on a non-partisan consensus because justice is a universal value. But more often than not, it has became a partisan movement because the related bills failed to pass through the Legislative Yuan, " said Ku Chung-hwa, a professor at National Chengchi University (NCU).
Rather than operating along ideal lines, the movement has become "an electoral mobilization tool, " said Ku in a seminar titled "Complete Justice, Better Democracy" and organized by the pro-independence Taiwan Thinktank.
It is easy to understand why the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) has done all it could to block bills and oppose the campaign, because the movement was directed to the KMT, said Hsu Yung-ming, a research fellow at Academia Sinica.
Transitional justice in Taiwan cannot be achieved without a legislative majority, which means the people of Taiwan have to voice their opinion in the elections, Hsu said.
Media bias is another of the major reasons that transitional justice has been so difficult to implement. What Taiwan needs, said Lilian Wang, a journalism professor at NCU, is a public forum and mass media outlets to publicize the truth so that people might understand their "real history."