Justice & Law Quote by Chen Shui-bian

A constitution is usually sold as a nation’s neutral instruction manual; Chen Shui-bian frames it instead as an unfinished moral project. “We also intend” is doing quiet political work: it signals agenda-setting without sounding radical, a careful step-by-step posture from a leader who knew how quickly constitutional language can trigger geopolitical alarms. The phrase “deal with the issue” is bureaucratically bland, but that blandness is strategic. It smuggles in a transformative claim - that rights are not assumed, they are chosen, written, enforced.

The subtext is Taiwan’s long shadow of martial law and authoritarian governance, where “rights” were historically contingent on the state’s mood. By positioning “basic human rights” as something to be “incorporated,” Chen implies both a gap in the existing framework and a democratic maturation story: the island is not merely prosperous or orderly, it is legitimate because it binds itself to universal constraints. That’s a bid for internal consolidation (democracy as a set of guardrails, not just elections) and external recognition (a liberal-democratic identity that plays well in the court of global opinion).

Context matters because constitutional reform in Chen’s era was never just domestic housekeeping. It sat inside the larger, explosive question of sovereignty and China’s insistence that Taiwan’s political self-definition not harden into permanent separation. “New constitution” hints at a foundational reset, yet the measured tone tries to keep it from sounding like a declaration. The line works because it’s both principled and tactical: rights as ethical commitment, and rights as diplomatic armor.