Unfinished Democracy: Transitional Justice in Taiwan

The article attempts to describe Taiwan's progress and a difficult position in practicing transitional justice during its democratic process. The first section reviews Taiwan's democratic progress and the impact on the implementation of transitional justice caused by a regime transition type. The second section describes Taiwan's authoritarian rule period, from February 28 Incident to the White Terror's political types of political cases. The third section analyses the reasons for Taiwan's unfinished transitional justice. The article claims that during Taiwan's political engineering of transitional justice, compensation for the victims was almost the only act of it and at the same time lacking legal or moral prosecution of the inflictors and the truth discovery. Taiwan has never had an opportunity to reflect on the damage caused by the system of the authoritarian rule, so that many inflictors or cooperators of the system have continued to serve in the democratized government in key positions, which has resulted in the prevailing phenomenon of impunity. Such a handling mode to compensate the victims, not willing to investigate the inflictors and seeking the historical truth, cannot solve the crime left by the authoritarian era alone, but it can also bring about a serious crisis of democratic governance in Taiwan.