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Third Republic Transitional Justice Legal Package (v1.2)

v1.2 | 2026-09-20 | Free China Movement (FCM) | Legal Package Overview | English

I. Purpose of the Legal Package

This legal package turns the “National Suffering and Freedom Memorial Day” policy from a principle-level initiative into an enforceable institutional framework. The four model laws interlock: establishing facts, opening archives, remedying victims, and building a national remembrance institution.

II. Four Core Laws

  1. Truth Commission Act (Model Draft): establishes an independent investigative body to confirm facts, preserve evidence, and recommend institutional reforms.
  2. Archives Openness Act (Model Draft): governs the preservation, transfer, declassification, disclosure, and privacy protection of relevant archives held by party and government organs and public institutions.
  3. Transitional Justice and Victim Reparation Act (Model Draft): governs victim eligibility, rehabilitation of reputation, reparation, rehabilitation, remembrance, and remedies.
  4. October 1 Memorial Day Act (Model Draft): links the October 1 commemoration system with the outcomes of investigation, archives, and reparation.

III. Common Principles

  • Popular sovereignty, the rule of law, due process, and protection of fundamental rights;
  • Individual responsibility, no collective guilt;
  • Victim-centred, while preserving the procedural rights of persons named;
  • Separation of fact-finding and criminal liability: the commission may not substitute for courts in determining guilt;
  • Archives open by default; exceptions must be specific, necessary, reviewable, and time-limited;
  • Reparation and rehabilitation of reputation must not be conditioned on political stance;
  • Institutional design should be subject to review by a future democratically mandated legislature.

IV. Relationship with the Existing Policy Proposal

This legal package is the implementing legal blueprint for the policy proposal “Redesignating October 1 as the ‘National Suffering and Freedom Memorial Day’“. The proposal sets the direction; the four laws respectively carry out the executive functions of fact-finding, archives, remedies, and remembrance.

V. International References

The drafts draw on UN principles and practical tools concerning effective remedies, reparation, the right to know, anti-impunity, and prevention of recurrence; the legal status of these materials is not identical, and they cannot be treated uniformly as directly applicable domestic law. Specific institutional powers, coercive measures, fiscal responsibilities, and judicial remedies must still be specified by the applicable constitution and future democratically mandated legislative processes.

Unified Legislative Notes and Implementation Roadmap

Unified legislative notes and implementation roadmap: see the “Third Republic Transitional Justice Legal Package — Legislative Notes & Implementation Roadmap v1.2“, which serves as the unified drafting baseline for the four model laws: constitutional consistency, international normative benchmarks, principles for the use of comparative law, a four-law division-of-functions matrix, rights-protection red lines, priority historical scope, and implementation phases.

The four implementing laws have all been uniformly upgraded to a formal “chapter — article — paragraph — subparagraph” v1.2 structure:

Comparative Practice & Implementation Evidence

ROC (Taiwan) comparison: Transitional Justice, Victim Remedies & Political Archives — comparative implementation evidence. The statistics and case-flow data on that companion page concern ROC (Taiwan), not mainland China; they are used only to test institutional design, sequencing, safeguards and measurable delivery.

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