Taiwan
COUNTRY- Latest Death Penalty Status
- Retentionist
- Country's Death Penalty Landscape
On 20 September 2024, the Taiwan Constitutional Court issued Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8 on the Constitutionality of the Death Penalty Case. The Court held that the provisions prescribing the death penalty as the most severe punishment for the crime of intentional homicide and related offenses do not violate the Constitution of Taiwan. However, such sentencing may only be applied to cases where the circumstances of the offense are the most serious, and criminal proceedings must adhere to stricter due process safeguards.
For the 37 death row inmates in Taiwan (who were also the petitioners in the constitutional litigation), the Constitutional Court’s judgment undoubtedly created an opportunity to request the Prosecutor General to file an "extraordinary appeal". However, for Taiwan's abolitionist movement, this ruling represents a significant setback indicating that in the near future it will be difficult to achieve abolition of the death penalty through a judicial declaration of unconstitutionality.
Moreover, given Taiwan's current political climate, following the Constitutional Court's judgment upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty, Kuomintang (KMT) Party legislators and certain media outlets manipulated public sentiment, falsely claiming that Taiwan had entered a state of “de facto abolition of the death penalty."The Legislative Yuan even proposed a "referendum against abolishing the death penalty" in 2025, seeking public approval for the requirement that "death sentences must be decided unanimously by a collegial panel of judges". Fortunately, this proposal was not successful. Developments in the year since the judgment demonstrate that the Constitutional Court’s decision has had profound implications. It has prompted Taiwan’s judicial, legislative, and executive branches to adopt a more passive approach toward implementing necessary measures for abolition—such as those required by the two international human rights covenants, their general comments, and the concluding observations from international review bodies—all of which call for the gradual removal of the death penalty.
- Country's Key Death Penalty Trends
Prior to 2000, Taiwan’s Supreme Court Justice’s had issued Interpretation No. 3, concluding that relevant death penalty provisions did not conflict with Taiwan’s Constitution. At that time, Taiwan’s criminal procedure system remained deeply rooted in the authoritarian era, leading to frequent disregard for defendants' procedural rights and hindering the pursuit of truth in criminal trials. This contributed to persistently high death penalty rates. The expedited adjudication of capital cases also indirectly resulted in multiple wrongful death sentences.
It was not until after the year 2000 that Taiwan’s Criminal Procedure Code underwent multiple major revisions. In 2012, the Supreme Court also declared that oral arguments must be conducted at the third appeal stage in death penalty cases. In 2018, the Supreme Court stipulated that pre-sentencing social investigations must be conducted, prompting the Judicial Yuan to establish the “Guidelines for Sentencing and Execution Decisions in Criminal Cases” in the same year, which improved the handling of death penalty cases.
Additionally, starting in 2023, Taiwan’s criminal justice system introduced a law judge system at the first-instance trial level. Qualified ordinary citizens serve alongside professional judges in lay judge panels to adjudicate criminal cases involving “intentional crimes resulting in death”. This means lay judges may participate in death penalty trials and potentially impose capital punishment on defendants. This aspect also presents a significant challenge for Taiwan’s criminal litigation system. According to Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8 lay judges and professional judges are not required to reach a unanimous decision in order to impose the death penalty on defendants. This differs from standard trial procedure which mandates a unanimous agreement among all professional judges to impose a capital sentence.
In the time after a death sentence has been handed down and before the Minister of Justice signs the execution order, if the death row inmate and their lawyer believe that any doubt remains in the case, they may pursue special relief procedures. This includes: petitioning the court for retrial, requesting the Prosecutor General to file an extraordinary appeal, petitioning the Constitutional Court for constitutional litigation, or petitioning the President for pardon or commutation of sentence. Alternatively, outside of judicial remedies, they may petition the Control Yuan to initiate an investigation by its commissioners. Following the commissioners’ investigative report, the special relief procedures outlined above may then be pursued by the death row inmate.
While Taiwan retains the death penalty as a punishment for “non-intentional homicide” cases, in practice, its application is now fundamentally restricted to cases of “intentional homicide” that meet the most stringent due process requirements. However, following Judgment 113-Hsien-Pan-8, the impact on further legal developments and judicial practice remains to be seen.
- Country Geolocation
Latitude: 23.6978
Longitude: 120.9605
- Country Geolocation
- Region
- East Asia
- Contributing Organisations
- Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (Taiwan)
- Contributing Organisation Logo
- Kind of Cases Contributed
The Taiwanese cases uploaded to the Death Penalty Defence - Asia database are all landmark cases featuring significant legal issues or interpretations. In each of these cases, the defendant was originally sentenced to death but later had the sentence commuted to life imprisonment after a final appeal. The complete judgments for these cases can be accessed through the publicly available Judicial Department Judgment System in Taiwan.
- Credibility of Contributing Organisation
Long-time partners in human rights movements, judicial reform, and death penalty exoneration efforts - including the Judicial Reform Foundation, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the Taipei Bar Association, and the Chang Fo-Chuan Center for the Study of Human Rights at Soochow University — were deeply moved by their inability to clear the names of Chiang Kuo-ching and Lu Cheng, both wrongfully executed, and by the urgency they felt while fighting to save defendants in the Su Chien-ho and Hsu Tzu-chiang cases from execution. These organisations resolved that, beyond individual cases, systemic reform was essential to prevent further unjust deaths and to stop the state from continuing to use the death penalty as a means of violence. Therefore, in 2003, these groups joined with other organisations and individuals to establish a civil society alliance with the ultimate goal of abolishing the death penalty. Initially named the "Alliance of Death Penalty Alternatives", it was renamed in 2006 as the Taiwan Alliance to End of the Death Penalty (TAEDP), hoping that one day Taiwan could become a country free from capital punishment.
- Official website
- Official Website
- Email address
info@taedp.org.tw