“All the World’s a Stage”: Taiwan’s Human Rights Performance and Playing to International Norms

Abstract

Taiwan’s engagement with the international regime for human rights has been exceptional for reasons related to Taiwan’s unusual status in the world. Taiwan’s precarious status has provided distinctive reasons to emphasize international human rights norms, including some of their more formal manifestations. In the 1980s and 1990s, the remarkable improvement in Taiwan’s human rights record was vital to maintaining U.S. support. In the late 1990s and 2000s, Taiwan’s commitment to human rights norms and values was an essential element in Taiwan’s efforts to preserve security and international stature. More recently, Taiwan has deepened its engagement with the UN-centered human rights regime, stressing compliance with that regime as if it were a member state, adopting domestic legislation to mirror the principal human rights covenants, and undertaking reports that parallel the requirements for States Parties to the major human rights conventions. While this approach has benefited Taiwan internationally and the lives of Taiwan’s citizens, Taiwan’s human rights engagement strategy faces new and difficult challenges: internationally, the benefits of a relatively strong human rights record may be waning; domestically, discourse about human rights is turning to more intractable or controversial problems, including issues that resonate with economic, social and cultural dimensions of human rights, and issues of transitional justice.