ROC (Taiwan) Comparative Practice — Transitional Justice, Victim Remedies & Political Archives

Current Public Research Edition — updated September 2026

This section examines contemporary transitional-justice implementation as an institutional case. It asks not only whether a program, budget, archive decision or remedy exists on paper, but whether it is staffed, funded, delivered, accessible and capable of producing measurable institutional or victim-level results.

Research framework: implementation is a chain

The research separates policy design → approval → staffing → funding → operation → output → actual delivery → practical use → outcome. Training attendance is not automatically evidence of learning or behavior change; an appropriation is not expenditure; declassification is not the same as searchable or directly viewable access; and approval of a victim remedy is not the same as actual payment, registration, return or certificate delivery.

Institutional coordination and education

The Executive Yuan revised its national transitional-justice education program in 2026. The Office for Strengthening Democratic Resilience was formally inaugurated on June 17, 2026 and was assigned cross-ministry strategy, coordination and review functions connected to transitional-justice fund administration. This establishes an actual coordination layer, but does not by itself prove independent oversight or measurable policy outcomes.

The Ministry of Education’s transitional-justice education office had already entered staffing and resource preparation, including contract personnel and an expanded funding plan, while formal establishment remained a separate question at the latest verified stage. A 2025–2028 plan for strengthening postwar Indigenous transitional justice was formally approved in November 2025; an Executive Yuan meeting in June 2026 nevertheless acknowledged multiple implementation delays and directed improvement.

Agency-specific education has moved beyond general statements into actual delivery. Verified examples include four Coast Guard sessions reaching 239 participants through March 6, 2026; a National Police field-learning program with 39 participants; a Judicial Academy course on August 14 with 79 Ministry of Justice system personnel; and an August 28 cross-ministry human-rights and transitional-justice program involving more than 100 participants. These are delivery indicators, not yet proof of changed operational behavior.

Victim remedies: July 2026 case-flow picture

Official cumulative figures through July 2026 show several different administrative stages that must not be collapsed into one number.

• Life and personal liberty: 4,021 accepted applications; 3,162 approved compensation decisions; 125 rejected; 70 withdrawn. The official cumulative decision total of 3,287 equals approvals plus rejections, not all accepted cases.
• Property: 399 accepted; 42 approved; 215 rejected; 56 withdrawn. The official decision total of 257 equals approvals plus rejections.
• Reputation restoration: 6,342 accepted; 5,299 approved; 79 rejected; 55 withdrawn. The official decision total of 5,378 equals approvals plus rejections.

These figures demonstrate why “accepted minus decisions” should not automatically be called the pending caseload: withdrawals, suspensions and other procedural statuses can sit outside that subtraction. They also do not answer the most important delivery question—how many approved remedies were actually received.

From approval to actual delivery

The public research therefore follows a separate delivery chain: application → investigation → board decision → written disposition → payment notice, property-registration instruction or certificate production → actual payment, registration, return or certificate delivery → practical use → victim outcome.

Official rules make the distinction concrete. Approved original-property restoration requires registration action before title is actually restored. Monetary property compensation can be completed over a period of up to three years and may be paid in installments. Reputation-restoration statistics generally report applications and decisions, not the number of certificates actually received by recipients.

At least one official case demonstrates completed in-kind property restoration: after investigation of confiscated land, shares and cash, portions still held as public property were returned to heirs while other portions no longer recoverable in kind were converted to monetary compensation. That proves the remedy can move from decision to delivery, but it does not establish an aggregate delivery rate for all approved property cases.

Education-related reputation restoration

The Ministry of Education identified 815 political victims with teacher or student status as a potentially eligible population for school-based reputation-restoration measures. Possible measures include honorary diplomas, restoration ceremonies, correction of school histories or archives, and integration of individual life histories into campus memory. The figure 815 is a potential population, not a count of completed restorations.

Completed examples include honorary-diploma restoration for Zhao Qingyuan and Lin Qingtian at Tamkang University. These cases show that the mechanism has moved into actual implementation, while the completion denominator across the full identified population remains an open research question.

Funding: separate channels must stay separate

The 2026 budget for the victim-rights restoration foundation included roughly NT$2.06 billion in government subsidy revenue, of which about NT$2.0 billion was for compensation and about NT$60 million for operations. The Legislative Yuan completed action on the foundation budget on August 14, 2026. This compensation channel is distinct from the Executive Yuan’s central transitional-justice coordination budget. A reduction in one therefore cannot be described as eliminating the other.

Even here, budget authority is not the same as cash delivered to victims. The next evidentiary layer is actual expenditure, individual payment, unpaid installment balance and decision-to-delivery time.

Political archives: from custody to practical access

Official archive information published in 2026 reported approximately 2.968 kilometers of political-archive holdings, more than 460,000 public catalog records, digitization of more than 96 percent of political archives, and more than 2.1 million pages of de-identified political-archive images made directly available online without an application. These are different denominators: a digitized item is not automatically a directly downloadable image, and a public catalog entry does not necessarily mean the underlying image is online.

Among archives already transferred, classified catalog records reportedly fell from 72,998 to 21. A separate historical cohort of more than 25,000 records previously treated as permanently classified was re-reviewed; 865 received extended classification, while redacted copies were transferred and opened for use in September 2024. The figures 21 and 865 describe different cohorts and should not be merged or presented as 865 wholly inaccessible records.

Notification and monitored-person access

Five official notification batches for people appearing in monitored-person files were announced between July 2024 and June 2026: 158, 64, 86, 189 and 12 notification slots respectively. Their simple sum is 509 notification slots, but the published material does not establish that there is no duplication across batches, so this research does not convert that sum into 509 unique people.

The mechanism itself is important: privacy-sensitive page review → direct or public-notice notification → priority free inspection or copying by the person concerned → opportunity to provide a supplemental or differing account and express a privacy-release preference → statutory waiting and follow-up → later catalog or name-index publication → broader public use.

The Lin Yi-hsiung residence-case archive pipeline

Archives relating to the Lin Yi-hsiung residence case were declassified. An official keyword search was reported to yield 1,373 searchable catalog records, while a separate group of 258 privacy-sensitive records entered phased notification processing. Catalog opening for that privacy-sensitive cohort was scheduled after the statutory process, with expected stages in December 2026 and June 2027. A planned opening date is not treated as completed access.

Large security-agency transfer: unit caution

A recent National Security Bureau transfer was reported as 51,133 items, with a separate figure of 1,369 volumes. Archive procedures distinguish item, volume, case/file and catalog-record levels. Until an accession-level bridge maps those units, the public research does not divide catalog-record counts by the 51,133-item figure to manufacture a completion percentage.

Open research questions

• Aggregate actual delivery of approved compensation, property restoration and reputation certificates.
• Unpaid installment balances and decision-to-delivery latency.
• The accession bridge for the 51,133-item security-agency transfer.
• Item-level determination and transfer status of the separate 226-box archive body.
• The remaining classified-record cohorts and their actual redacted or unredacted accessibility.
• Final transfer of the remaining military-intelligence archive body.
• Whether education and institutional self-history programs produce documented rule, practice, discipline or complaint changes.

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See also: the Seven-Law Transition Package, the model-law companion to the practice surveyed here.

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