I deeply regret the fact that Taiwan carried out another execution on 1 April 2020 and that the de facto moratorium on the death penalty that had been in place since May 2016 was thereby broken. The German Government is opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances, as it is a brutal and inhumane form of punishment. Together with our EU partners, we have been working intensively for many years to bring about the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

This new execution is a setback for human rights in Taiwan, a stable democracy which otherwise has very high human rights standards. I call upon those responsible to refrain from carrying out any more death sentences and to return to the moratorium as a first step towards abolishing capital punishment.