Let’s get started.

Thank you very much for your time. I’m glad that I can meet you. I think it was mentioned in the email that I’m doing some research about Taiwan’s COVID 19 pandemic management and the protection of human rights during the pandemic management.

Maybe first of all, first question if I may, what do you think, in your opinion, were the main success factors for Taiwan’s pandemic management? Why was Taiwan successful in managing the pandemic for a long time?

The number one reason was probably our SARS experience. Back in 2003, we’ve had, quite tragic, a lockdown of an entire hospital of the SARS epidemic. Taiwan suffered the most among our nearby jurisdictions.

We set up not just a legal structure for the central epidemic command center, the Communicable Disease Act, and so on, but everyone who is above 30 years old remembers SARS. This time around, we understand that if you don’t do our quarantine, contract tracing, mask wearing, we will go back to the bad old SARS days. I think that’s the number one reason.

Other important factors in your opinion.

Also, I mentioned a lot of infrastructures that’s built after SARS. When SARS hit Taiwan, we were still using paper based national health cards, except in Pescador Island, which piloted IC card based cards for universal health care.

Right after SARS, people understood the importance of having a real time IC card connected to a universal health database. In the almost two decades that followed, there’s no cybersecurity incidents in the national health database.

The NHI played a crucial role, this time not just for the healthcare, but also for procuring masks, rapid testing, vaccination, and so on, mostly because it covers all the residents, not just citizens.

For many provisioning of public resources, maybe it made sense to distinguish between citizens and residents, but in a pandemic, such distinctions is harmful because we want to protect everyone.

Did the contact tracing or the digital infrastructure play an important role as well in your opinion?

Border quarantine, contact tracing, mask wearing, hand washing, physical distancing all played its role, but I think it’s the all out mobilization. If you ask a random person on the street ever since February 2020, they probably think that the CDC is not mandating enough. They’re probably doing above and beyond what the CDC has mandated.

For a while, for example, we have to wear a mask or keep physical distance, but pretty much everyone I met wears a mask and [laughs] kept physical distance. This is the all out mobilization.

It’s a good point. When it comes to the protection of human rights, of individual rights, did it play a role during the COVID 19 pandemic management in your opinion?

I think the “avoid lockdown at all costs” strategy protected a very important human right, which is the right to move, to mobilize, to assemble, to protest if needed. In jurisdictions, which rushed to lockdowns, you see the human rights situation deteriorate because people do not have a natural way to assemble.

In Taiwan, because on the Internet we don’t do administrative takedowns, in the physical world, we’ve never had a single day of lockdowns. That means that people are free to assemble, either online or offline, on the better innovations to counter the pandemic and innovate along with the state capacity.

This is about not just preserving but relying on a vibrant civil society, the civic capacity, in order to innovate on ways to counter the pandemic.

Did human rights play a role in public debates?

Definitely. We see human rights as not just something that we protect, but rather, something that we advance. With more rights to assemble, to collaborate, to free speech, it means that more good ideas are being generated.

It’s not just something that we want to preserve as in trying to keep the status quo not affected by the pandemic. Rather, we want to advance those human rights, including the rights to assemble and innovate because the CECC cannot understand everything on the field.

We rely on those freedoms and human rights in order for the social sector to brainstorm on better ways to, for example, distribute masks, contact tracing, and so on.

I had this impression that the topic of human rights was mostly raised by civil society actors, by human rights organizations in Taiwan. This were the most important actors advising…

Definitely, but in the cabinet and the people who are running the administration, many of them used to lead or work very closely with like the Taiwan Association of Human Rights.

It’s not just the people in the civil society but also, because this current administration is composed of many people who previously worked at very vocal civil society leaders on human rights advancement. We have this natural affinity to the human rights groups in civil society.

I myself work in Free Software Movement for more than two decades now. Using software to advance freedom has always been my thing. It doesn’t change just because I become a digital minister.

I also heard that for the apps that have been used that the data needs to be deleted after a certain time, right?

28 days, yeah.

Were there any other measures for data protection besides this?

Yes, for example, in our SMS based contact tracing system, even though it is true that a QR code you scan, the 15 random digits will be stored in your telecom for 28 days before it’s deleted, the telecom doesn’t know what those 15 digits mean. It’s entirely random. Only the venue knows what it means, but a venue knows nothing about your phone number or where you’ve been.

This is called federation or multiparty security. Only authorized contact tracers can piece together the puzzles. All the players in this ecosystem do not have any personal data that they can use to re identify you. Even if some of them suffer cybersecurity threats, no incidents access those data.

The judge not just denied the search warrant, but whistle blowed on the public media saying that the Ministry of Justice, the CECC must interpret the wiretapping law such that contact tracing falls outside of the wire tappable private communication, which we immediately did. I was part of that conversation.

Unlike pretty much all our nearby jurisdictions, which took an approach of “Maybe we can use contact tracing data for very serious crimes” — Korea, Singapore, Australia all did that — we didn’t. We said the private communication through SMS are retained for six months as per the wiretapping act, but the CECC said very clearly the contact tracing SMS are to be deleted after four weeks.

Just by the data retention requirements, it’s very clear it’s different things. It must not be wiretapped, and the wiretapping apparatus must leave the contact tracing alone, which is why we regained the trust of the judge, certainly, but also of the civil rights groups.

This incident shows that it’s not just a technical thing. There needs to be a strong social norm against outside of purpose use in order for this purely opt in system…You can always go back to writing your names or stamping your way in.

To gain people’s trust, we must always trust the citizens to understand our not using any of this in an outside of purpose way. Anyone can check our work by going into this website, using their phone, and see which contact tracers in the past four weeks have accessed their SMS records for this purpose.

This was the only incident that happened for the police?

Yes, there was no other incident.

That’s interesting. For the measures that the CECC is imposing, is there any kind of review mechanism, for example, how to protect human rights or how human rights might be violated by these measures?

I personally was part of the quarantine experience. When I returned from Italy to Taiwan this year, I was the last batch to go through seven plus seven, that’s to say seven days of home isolation.

I’m very happy to see that the quarantine notice, both for domestic and oversea return cases, there’s a clear habeas corpus clause in the notification saying that if I feel that I have been incorrectly designated for quarantine, I can always appear before the court, of course, maybe via video conference. [laughs]

This is very important. If not for the human rights groups and the civil society pushing for the CECC to consider quarantine as a sort of habeas corpus related clause, the Communicable Disease Control Act wasn’t very clear on this.

This is a very gainful partnership from the whistleblowers or civil society, human rights advocates, and the people in the administration or within CECC who were part of the human rights advocacy and leaders who sympathize fully with their concerns, immediately made the change. I think this is important.

That’s a good point. When it comes to debate in the legislative Yuan — I will also need to speak with opposition parties, but I haven’t met with them yet — do you think that the opposition parties also warrant this criticism like KMT or TPP, or are they more concerned about other points, for example that the measures are not efficient or effective?

The ruling party, the DPP, is historically the most human right advocating party among the four. Because of that, there’s also a lot of constructive criticism from the DPP when it comes to human rights protection. It’s not a ruling party opposition party thing. Everybody cares a lot about human right.

People, especially legislators, took a very constructive role when they figure out, for example, when we were rationing out the mask. We were initially distributing by the belief that the pharmacies align with the population centers.

The same distance on the map is not the same as the time opportunity cost that people have to pay to take a bus versus taking a metro versus having to drive a long way.

Although on the map it’s the same distance, it’s actually a different time cost to access the publicly rationed mask. This is also, of course, a human rights issue, how much were you excluded from the public health regimes?

Because we open all the real time data every 30 seconds of the real time pharmacy imagery, the opposition party legislator who questioned this rationing arrangement, the CECC’s leader, Minister Chen Shih chung, immediately said, “OK, legislator, teach us.”

They share the same open data as we do, so if they say that our rationing way is not fair to the people in the rural areas, chances are that they know how to do it better. That’s how we turned this opposition dynamic into a co creation dynamic. The MP did — the name’s Ann Kao — eventually suggest a better way of rationing, and we implemented I think next day. [laughs]

I think this is not a party politic thing. Everybody cares about human rights as well as we care about, of course, successfully countering the pandemic.

That’s an important point. If I understood correctly from the structure of the CECC, it is only the Legislative Yuan that controls the CECC and could interfere in measures of the CECC, is that right? The CECC is mostly independent, right, in the decisions that it’s taking against the pandemic?

Yes, the CECC is authorized by, first, the CDA and next the Special Act, are given very strong administrative powers. If the president wants, of course, she can always declare a state of emergency, in which case even the legislative Yuan doesn’t have any checks and balances anymore until after the emergency. We’ve seen many other jurisdictions do that.

The president never did so, and I think the reason why was that she was very aware that the CDA and later on the Special Act already gave the CECC sufficient authorizations of power while having its budget and its legal actions being fully supervised by the legislature.

At no point did we declare a state of emergency. We cannot do anything that’s not already deemed legal by the legislature.

Would you say that the cooperation between the CECC, the government, and the legislative Yuan was mostly non-conflictual? It was more like working and cooperating together?

Certainly, certainly. Our premier very much supported CECC’s work and, in many cabinet meetings, assured the CECC that all ministries, whether they’re related or not by the CECC’s founding acts, must fully support the CECC. It is also helpful that both of our vice presidents during the entire pandemic, VP Chen Chien jen, and VP William Lai, specialized in public health.

There’s this very strong political support from the presidential office as well. In other jurisdiction, we usually see that the leadership on economy and the leadership on countering pandemic may not always see eye to eye when it comes to pandemic control.

The important thing in Taiwan is that the VP, which has the president’s blessing, especially VP Chen Chien jen, to essentially advise the CECC is a senior advisor, indeed the authority, literally the author of the textbook of epidemiology, holds this as something that’s not a dial between economic performance and pandemic, public health performance.

They had a very clear idea of how to make the economic growth go concurrently with the countering of the pandemic, which is later on called the Taiwan model. Of course, New Zealand adopted a very similar model with a little bit more lockdowns, but essentially the same model.

Many other jurisdictions, because there’s no conceptual integrity in the leadership, they move towards one pole. Then things go pretty bad, and they go back to lockdowns. Then they open, and then they go back to lockdowns.

That makes the political capital dwindle very quickly. In Taiwan, we see that because we’ve never had this zigzag, the leadership were very much in the same place on the integral response to the pandemic.

That’s also important. For the human rights topic, you mentioned that one strategy was to avoid lockdowns at all costs because of causable to interfere with human rights. We also covered data protection.

What about the protection of one of the groups, for example, foreign workers during the pandemic? What measures did the government take about this problem?

If you’re a legal worker, chances are you have the National Health Insurance card. If you have an NHI card, you automatically are qualified to pretty much all the pandemic related measures.

The only group that potentially were excluded was people who outstayed their original work permit. Of course, we offer visa extensions and so on. If the foreign workers does not want to show up and they have an expired NHI card, then these people were the early ones that were excluded.

We don’t even know how many are there. [laughs] Not precisely, anyway. When we did the vaccination program, even though for the online vaccination booking system, we extended to pretty much everyone who has any kind of number, including a passport number.

Still, the illegal migrant workers did not show up, because they were quite afraid they will get deported or somehow found.

The Immigration Bureau within the Ministry of Interior explicitly set up an anonymizing vaccination stops in the Taipei main station, among other places around Taiwan. You can show up without identifying yourself, and get vaccinated with no legal repercussions. That’s very important.

They were also used by the illegal migrant workers, these centers…?

Yes.

It’s interesting. I also heard that one concern or one group that was affected were fishermen or foreign fishermen working on fishing vessels. This was also a problem that they didn’t have proper access to protective equipment, for example, on fishing vessels.

That data might be true. I’m less involved in that data.

Any other human rights topics that have been discussed in the government when it comes to pandemic management?

Yeah. Another human rights situation occurs when people…As part of this contact tracing, previously in 2020, February, and March, people in many venues required that their visitors write their full name, full contact phone, as well as their citizen’s ID, as well as much more than actually required for contact tracing.

It became an overarching data collection for personal data. It was not very clear that they would delete it after 28 days. The CECC explicitly changed the name from 實名制, real name policy to 實聯制, real contact policy, in a sense that the venue do not have a right to ask the customers to write their full name or any identifying name.

You can just write a nickname, you surname, or really anything. As long as there is some way, an email or phone number, that can notify you where there is a local outbreak in the venue. The venue must delete that after four weeks. They must not collect unnecessary personal data.

In 2021, we also saw that many third party providers online and many other technologies, again, collected much more data than necessary, when people do not want to use pen and paper anymore because the risk of community infection is higher in 2021 than 2020.

Again, we adopted the G0v communities SMS design that we just talked about, to replace essentially those centralized line based or form based data collection.

The data collection, when it resides on a third party solution provider, which doesn’t offer into an encryption, you cannot be sure that they’ll delete all the data and creates a tech service for cyber security intrusions.

All this, we needed to respond in maybe just three days. We did so. Both the 2020’s invention of the idea of a real contact instead of a real name, and the implementation of that as a centralized SMS are in direct response of the over collection of personal data in terms of human rights protection.

That’s also a good point. Then also, that was in 2020 only for a short term. Then it was imposed on medical workers that they could not leave Taiwan…

…two months or such a period of time.

Also, students for a while. It was around the same time that we restricted mask export because they were considered critical resources, both the medical personnel and the masks. We didn’t know how bad it would get.

Some of the workers complained about it…

…definitely. Mostly, this was erring on overly cautious. This year, we moved to coexistence. The CECC wanted all the hospitals to have dedicated beds and units in response to a surge, that we anticipate to be more than, I think, a hundred thousand a day. We never got to that number.

It’s true, the CECC was erring on the side of over cautiousness, at least in the beginning. For very good reasons, I’m sure. When it became very apparent that it was not as bad as we thought, they relaxed those restrictions very quickly, too.

It seems a bit the same with the quarantine regulations. Most countries or almost all countries have abandoned the requirement for quarantine. Taiwan still has a very short quarantine. I note it’s three plus four at the moment. That’s also, of course, an interference of human rights.

The CDA, the Communicable Disease Act, was very clear on that. The human right violation as found by the constitutional court, as well as legislature during the SARS times was that it was an unspecified amount of time.

There’s no compensation. There’s no habeas corpus. In the short quarantine, which I personally went through, it’s not like that. I know from the very beginning it was just going to be seven days. I know from the very beginning that there will be full coverage of the cost involved, including the saliva based test and things like that.

For people who have to be quarantined despite they’re not a returning visitor or an infected person, but just someone who is a close family member or listed as a contact, those three days quarantine you eluded to, there are NT $1,000 per day to compensate for their loss of productivity. There’s still a compensation.

Finally, there’s always habeas corpus if you feel that you have been misidentified. I think it’s pretty proportional.

Some Taiwanese still complained about the conditions in the current government-run hotels.

Yes, for a long time, we preferred quarantine at home, but that changed last year of the delta virus in Pingtung where we switched over to the hotels or government run quarantine centers, which, of course, is not as comfortable as the home. [laughs]

I did a home quarantine. It wasn’t bad at all, but I can fully imagine that if there’s a relocation to some place that you’re not very familiar with, then, of course, it causes a certain distress.

There were some complaints, but the problems have not been resolved?

People generally understood that the CECC doesn’t prefer centralized quarantine. We always have preferred at home quarantine. It was just because we did not know how bad delta was or omicron is going to be.

For a while, the CECC switched to centralized quarantine, and that was, by the way, in response to a popular outcry. [laughs] It’s always the citizens demanded more than the CECC imposed.

For the people who went through this, I’m sure that it’s very uncomfortable. As soon as we were able to say our vaccination is high enough, we switched to co existence and back to at home quarantine. We understand this is pretty much the only way to make things work because people would find it more acceptable if you’re quarantining at home.

When it comes to the protection of human rights, you have mentioned human rights organizations but also that the background of the DPP has a close connection to civil society.

Has there also been exchanges with other countries, with international scholars specialized in human rights protection? Did Taiwan tried to look at other countries and how they have managed the protection of human rights during the pandemic?

Definitely. The CECC is special in the sense that it had its own legal group, and it’s not run by the Ministry of Health and Welfare but rather by the Ministry of Justice itself. In a sense, the CECC is a prototype of cross ministerial data protection and human rights protection regime that the Taiwan administration didn’t have before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, each ministry is its own data protection authority, and they may have different interpretations on the human rights interpretations of our Data Protection Act, for example. Although the Minister of Justice and later on the National Development Council served as a harmonizer of the interpretations, there was no cabinet level joint operations when it comes to data protection, personal data protection.

Thanks to the CECC’s cross ministerial assembly, for the first time, many ministers and we, the minister at large, the [Chinese] , got actively involved in the personal data protection work across ministries because the CECC systems are almost all across ministries.

For the first time, we had this cabinet level conversation. One of the results was that there’s now a cabinet level headed by, I think, three horizontal ministers at large, personal data protection joint meeting. Even though there’s currently no independent DPA, the ministers at large are all independent of the vertical ministries.

We’re between and above the vertical ministries. When they cannot, for example, harmonize their own interpretations with other ministries, the at large ministers could. That’s why we set up this cabinet level personal data protection meetings for this kind of work. It’s a regular meeting.

Before, we had independent DPA, GDPR style. I think the cabinet level is already stronger than before the pandemic where it’s all the work of the individual vertical ministers.

That’s a good point though. I’m personally from Germany, so from the European Union. Maybe when it comes to international cooperation, for Taiwan, it’s difficult sometimes to get access to vaccines, get access to the WHO, unfortunately. What are the the expectations of Taiwan to the international community, to European countries when it comes to assistance to fight against the pandemic?

This time around, if Taiwan was part of WHO in 2019, December, [laughs] then everybody else will learn about this 10 days before. [laughs] That may have prevented a lot of life loss. I think it is quite sad that Taiwan did not have full ministerial access to the WHO system because certainly, we started house inspection the first day of 2020.

The same with vaccines? You expect maybe more cooperation in this area as well?

We’re a party of COVAX. In that sense, we are part of this international network. I understand the WHO sponsors, for example, the solidarity studies of the Taiwan home grew Medigen in the hope that we can distribute it more widely to give out our vaccines to help the world. In that sense, we’re part of this system.

As I mentioned, this working level access is not the same as ministerial access so we was not part of the, for example, conversation about the fair distribution of vaccines before the COVAX was set up and Taiwan joined the COVAX. Including Taiwan more on the agenda setting stage is very important too, not just the working level.

If I may, I’ll come to my last question, a question about Mainland China and their COVID strategy, Taiwan and Mainland China both had, more or less, a zero COVID strategy. I think in Taiwan it was not officially the policy but, at least for some time, you followed it.

No, we didn’t do lockdowns.

You didn’t do lockdowns.

It’s very different way to get to zero covid.

Yeah, it’s a very different way, but did it play a role, the measures that Mainland China has imposed, were they part of the debate in Taiwan, in comparison to Mainland China? Of course, Taiwan has a much different society, so you don’t follow…

We really cannot do those top down lockdowns mostly because people find that very traumatic during the SARS days. Also, because we really trusted the citizens that they will make the MPIs work the mask wearing, and so on.

The PRC regime took the Wuhan response and made it replicable way. Whenever any place happened…There’s a community outbreak, they immediately think of Wuhan, like motto, because there’s something they’re familiar with.

In Taiwan, we never familiarize ourselves [laughs] with this response. We had to be very active in contact tracing and in other non lockdown approaches. I believe South Korea made a very early decision very similar to us.

There was no political group in Taiwan that pushed for the same measures that mainland China has imposed as a model for Taiwan?

Early on, there are people who argued that the president should declare a state of emergency because in our democratic constitutional system is the only way to obtain the same authoritarian control that Beijing has over its population.

I don’t think President Tsai Ing wen was ever in favor of a state of emergency. The reason is that we’ve never had a situation where people felt that it’s beyond the civic capacity and the state capacity to counter the virus.

That is to say, the signs, the R value, the epidemiology is very well understood by any person on the street to the degree such that they voluntarily participate.

It was never felt that the people are just running without their mask and spreading the virus in the parties and we have to put them into curfew. [laughs] That there was never a divide between the civic and the state capacities, which is why we never entertain the idea of a state of emergency.

OK. I think I have covered all my questions.

Excellent.

Thank you very much again for your time. Is there anything you would like to add? Anything that I have forgotten when it comes to human rights and pandemic management? Anything that you think is…?

The national infectious disease response system, the system that enabled the contact tracing and the national healthcare integration later this year will designate it out into a critical information infrastructure.

Just like our critical infrastructure covers the physical, the power grid, and so on, we believe that the information system that enables our entire model is pretty much as critical [laughs] as the electric grid. Basically, giving it a designation of critical infrastructure.

This is not just prudent, but it is probably necessary. The next Greek letter, you never know [laughs] when it comes. That’s just the coronavirus. Who know what other kinds of virus?

As compared to many jurisdictions, Taiwan enjoys the advantage of the SARS experience. We established critical legal and technical infrastructures after SARS, which is why we respond to COVID so well.

The COVID also prompted us to think about new infrastructures that we did not have back in 2003. We’re now looking at those infrastructures and designating it, so that we don’t disband them after the COVID is over.

Rather, to make sure that they function well, that we can bootstrap it much more quickly the next time something worse than COVID happens to us. Almost by definition, the next quick character will leave us with a shorter time to respond. It will be more viral.

Basically, if it’s less viral, then of course it doesn’t go viral. There’s already omicron around. When — I don’t know — Pi or some other Greek letter comes, we will be left with even fewer days to respond.

Which is why having the critical infrastructure in an operating position is so important. That’s the message we always wanted to share. Certainly not in the WHA meeting, but in the many lateral and bilaterals. That this is not the last pandemic.

The postponed pandemic times, you need to invest in building such public digital infrastructures while the memories is still fresh. After a couple of years of no pandemic, there’s no political will anymore to invest in such infrastructures, so do so while the memory’s still fresh.

I think it’s a very good idea to plan ahead for the next pandemic. I’m afraid that our country’s only reacted, that is, the European countries.

Usually, the antibodies start to really build on the second shot.

That’s a good point. Thank you very much again for your time. I’m very happy that we could meet.

Cheers. Thank you.