The death penalty in Taiwan: controversies and counter-narratives
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- DLT
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to host a roundtable discussion as part of this year’s Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School on the death penalty in Taiwan, bringing together legal, activist, and film-maker perspectives on contemporary controversies and counter-narratives.
The death penalty remains one of the most contested issues in Taiwan’s public and political life. This roundtable will explore the narratives that continue to sustain capital punishment, as well as the efforts of scholars, activists, and cultural practitioners to challenge them. Placing Taiwan within a wider global context, the discussion will consider how public opinion, political discourse, legal argument, and cultural representation shape debate around the death penalty and its possible alternatives.
The event will bring together speakers working across human rights advocacy, abolitionist organising, and documentary film. Topics will include global and comparative perspectives on the death penalty, research on public and legislative attitudes in Taiwan, the work of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty, and the role of storytelling and film in reshaping how condemned prisoners and their families are understood. Through discussion and audience exchange, the roundtable will consider how dominant narratives of punishment may be unsettled and what more humane forms of justice might look like.
Organiser
This roundtable is organised in collaboration with the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty and The Death Penalty Project.
Image credit: film still from ‘Me and My Condemned Father’, directed by Lee Chia-hua
About the speakers
Saul Lehrfreund is co-founder and co-executive director of The Death Penalty Project, an international human rights organisation based in London. A specialist in constitutional and international human rights law, he has represented prisoners under sentence of death before domestic and international courts since 1992 and has worked on death penalty litigation and advocacy in countries including Uganda, Nigeria, Malawi, Ghana, India, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, and China.
Lin Hsin-yi is a Taiwanese social activist and Executive Director of the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty, a position she has held since 2007. A founding member of the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network and a steering committee member of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she has spent decades working in the abolition movement and has personally engaged with nearly one hundred death row prisoners. Her work focuses on abolishing the death penalty and humanising the correctional system through evidence-based advocacy, public dialogue, and long-term engagement with prisoners and their families.
Lee Chia-hua is an independent filmmaker from Taiwan and Associate Professor in the College of Communication at National Chengchi University. He has worked in documentary filmmaking for many years, and his films have received major recognition, including awards at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, the Taipei Film Awards, and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival. His work has consistently explored difficult social questions through close attention to lived experience and moral complexity.
Carolyn Hoyle is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and a leading scholar of criminal justice and the death penalty. She has published empirical and theoretical research on a number of criminological topics including domestic violence, policing, restorative justice, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions.
