Our photo shows a sports carnival for foreign workers, staged by a local NGO. As the numbers of foreign workers and spouses in Taiwan have risen year by year, concern over their rights and interests has grown, and more attention is being paid to their leisure activities. (photo by Jimmy Lin) (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Fifty-five years ago, the United Na-tions adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, International Human Rights Day has been celebrated every year on December 12, a date when people around the world think about the theory and practice of human rights. At the beginning of December, the Preparatory Office for the National Human Rights Museum in Taiwan also took this opportunity to invite a broad range of Taiwanese and foreign scholars to a symposium on human rights theory, the rule of law and human rights, and the history of human rights. The aim was to educate the public about these issues.

In fact, in 2003 the Taiwanese news media devoted much attention to the human rights debate, and discussed a wide range of related issues, including the much-talked-about referendum law and the proposed new constitution, as well as the issue of labor rights, which crops up almost every year but is currently becoming very serious. Moreover, only recently there was an Internet banking security leak involving the theft of personal data. This civil rights news story was of great concern to ordinary citizens.

What sparked the first human rights debate in 2003 was a murder case going back 11 years, which hit the headlines again in January with the acquittal of Su Chien-ho, Liu Ping-lang, and Chuang Lin-hsun. The suspects and the families of the victims have all along sought redress for the injustice done to them, while court judgments have shifted back and forth between the two extremes of the death penalty and acquittal. The human rights and judicial implications of the case have been followed with great interest by Taiwanese society, and have indirectly advanced citizens' understanding of human rights and the evolution of the rules of evidence. When the Code of Criminal Procedure was revised on September 1, human rights and judicial reform organizations were most concerned about whether the presumption of innocence would in fact be observed in trials.

The Su Chien-ho case was not the only human rights issue this year. At the beginning of the year, SARS patients and people at risk who were quarantined in their homes had restrictions imposed on their freedom of movement and were even subjected to discrimination by ordinary citizens. This raised the question of how to balance individual freedom and the safety of society.

Moreover, in December the Taiwan Association for Human Rights issued a press release entitled "News Reports Violate Human Rights," which called attention to this issue for the first time. The committee pointed out that news reports such as that of Liu Hsia (penname Hsing Lin-tzu), a disabled writer who died after being beaten by her Indonesian caregiver at the beginning of the year, or the taxi driver who crashed into the Office of the President in August, or a case of incest, all of which involved people with mental illnesses, were not based on thorough investigation of sources on the part of the media. Irresponsible reporting can easily mislead the general public about the nature of mental illness.

During the 14 years since the end of martial law, the concepts of democracy and human rights have naturally spread in Taiwan. All sorts of human and civil rights organizations have thrived-including labor, indigenous peoples', women's, environmental, media, teachers', community, music, video, and tenants' rights associations, as well as consumer rights and judicial reform groups-demonstrating that human rights issues have become more and more important to the people. The propagation of human rights principles, street demonstrations, and legislative reform have all spurred the protection of human rights.

Since the DDP became the governing party in 2000, the government has unequivocally proclaimed its commitment to building Taiwan on a foundation of human rights, and has established the National Human Rights Commission. Although a number of human rights demands have already been met, some groups are calling for further progress in the implementation of their demands, and have established ties with existing human rights organizations. Against this background, the establishment of the Alliance of Fairness and Justice (a.k.a. the Pan-Purple Alliance) in August 2003 spelled a further step in the integration of the social movement for human rights.

There is no hiding the fact that as Taiwanese society becomes ever more pluralistic, its people are becoming more knowledgeable about human rights and the meaning and direction of human rights are becoming increasingly complex. In recent years, laws to protect disadvantaged groups have become more and more wide-ranging. Human rights are evidently on the upsurge, but because the concept of human rights can neither be internalized by everyone nor always be put into practice, human rights tragedies-such as elderly parents abandoned by their children, parents taking their children's lives when they themselves commit suicide, and the abuse of foreign wives-happen all too often. When such tragedies become news events that are piled one on top of the other, they are quickly embedded in people's minds. It would appear that although the seeds of human rights have been sown in the form of mutual respect and equality, we have a ways to go before they blossom fully.