Human Rights Day
This is a very complex picture (by Cooloud). Taiwan’s President and Vice-President were prisoners in this building during the White Terror. On Human Rights Day they announced its conversion into a Human Rights Memorial. However, at the same time, “not far from the ceremony, the police were forcefully breaking up a [peaceful] demonstration held by citizens protesting on the LeSheng Leprosy Institute issue.”
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Comments
One of the wonderful things about democracy is that your rights are not dependent upon the appropriateness of your actions, but adhere to you as a member of that democracy. Reasonable people will differ as to what is appropriate and the state does not have the right to impose its definition of appropriateness by force.
I share Kerim’s surprise here. Is the argument that the Losheng protest should be broken up because it’s ‘inappropriate’? I would have hoped for an argument describing it as illegal or a risk to the national executive, but ‘inappropriate’? I don’t think so. Obviously Kerim doesn’t think so. Who gets to decide what kind of protest is appropriate for the occasion? In fact, this question has been asked in Singapore, which considers itself a parliamentary democracy.
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
The Taiwan News had an editorial on this (can’t remember the date). It argued that the Losheng protestors’ actions were inappropriate for the occassion. It showed a lack of respect and understanding for the suffering that many Taiwanese endured in the martial law era. They could have chosen a more appropriate way of raising the issue without alienating those people who might otherwise be sympathetic to their cause.