A crowd gathered in Indonesia's Aceh province on August 20 to watch a public flogging, and according to a report from Ynet, some in the audience shouted "harder" as the canes came down. Video of the punishment, along with an earlier case in which a young couple was caned for kissing during a TikTok livestream, has traveled far beyond Indonesia in recent weeks, drawing condemnation from human rights advocates and casual social media users alike. That international reaction makes the timing notable for Taiwan, where opposition lawmakers have just pushed through a referendum asking voters whether the island should adopt caning as a criminal punishment of its own.
A Morning Of Public Punishment In Aceh
The August 20 caning session in Aceh, Indonesia's only province governed under Islamic law, punished eleven people across four separate offenses in a single public setting. Four people received 100 lashes each for extramarital sex, four others received 22 lashes for "physical intimacy" such as hugging or kissing, two people received seven lashes for what officials described as excessive closeness between unmarried partners, and one man received 20 lashes for drinking alcohol. Islamic law enforcement officers carried out the punishments in front of a crowd that included children who filmed the proceedings on their phones. One 22 year old witness, Eini Nadira, told reporters she considered the punishment entirely justified because it serves as a warning to other residents.
The scene echoed an earlier case that first drew global attention to Aceh's caning practice this year. According to the Guardian, an unmarried couple, a 22 year old man and a 25 year old woman, were caned 21 times each on July 2 after they were filmed kissing inside a car during a TikTok livestream in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. Witnesses said the woman flinched with each strike and eventually broke down crying and screaming in pain as the punishment continued in public. Footage of the case spread quickly online, and human rights organizations condemned it as inhumane, even as reporting on the ground suggested opinion inside Aceh itself is more divided, with some residents tying the punishment to religious identity and the province's unique degree of self-rule rather than viewing it purely as a human rights question.
A Photo Of A Sobbing Woman Draws A Flood Of Reactions Online
That split between local acceptance and outside horror was on full display when a photograph of a woman crying after being caned in one of Aceh's public punishments circulated on the social platform Reddit. The image needed no translation to convey its message, and it quickly pulled in a wave of shocked and angry reactions from an international audience largely unfamiliar with judicial caning, the kind of visceral response that has followed nearly every viral image to come out of Aceh's Sharia court system in recent years.
Taiwan's Opposition Parties Put Caning To A Public Vote
Roughly halfway around the world, Taiwan's opposition controlled legislature has been moving in a very different direction on the same question. According to Taiwan's Public Television Service, the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People's Party jointly pushed through a referendum proposal on August 14 asking voters: "Do you agree that the government should establish a special criminal justice system, in which caning is declared by courts and carried out according to law, targeting sexual assault, child abuse, large scale fraud and aggravated compound fraud, in order to deter continued crime?" The referendum is expected to be held alongside Taiwan's nine-in-one local elections at the end of 2026.
Kuomintang legislator Hung Meng-kai has argued that introducing caning would help address public safety concerns, while fellow Kuomintang lawmaker Lee Yen-hsiu said the move reflects public expectations about crime and gives society a chance to debate the issue directly through a referendum. Opponents have been just as vocal. Taiwan's Control Yuan human rights committee said caning "does not meet international human rights standards protecting human dignity and prohibiting torture," and a coalition of human rights groups issued a joint statement arguing the proposal would violate the domestic legal force of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Taiwan has incorporated into its own law even though it is not a United Nations member state.
A Punishment With Roots In Slavery And Colonial Law
Judicial caning has a long and uncomfortable history, one outlined by the legal reference site LegalClarity. Flogging was widespread in ancient civilizations; ancient Rome punished enslaved people with a leather whip called a flagellum, with a more brutal version known as the "scorpion" capable of killing the person being flogged. England formally authorized whipping vagrants and beggars by law in 1531, and in the American South, flogging became a central tool for controlling enslaved people, cementing the punishment's close historical association with racial oppression.
Roughly two dozen countries still retain judicial flogging or caning today, falling broadly into two categories. One consists of countries governed by Islamic law, including Iran, where at least 148 offenses can carry a flogging sentence, including alcohol consumption and drug use, and Saudi Arabia, which used the punishment extensively for years before formally abolishing it in April 2020. The other consists of former British colonies, including Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and parts of Indonesia such as Aceh, all of which retain some form of judicial caning in their legal systems today.
Human Rights Groups Say Taiwan Is Moving Backward
International human rights bodies have made their opposition to corporal punishment explicit. The United Nations' Nelson Mandela Rules classify flogging among the corporal punishments that amount to torture or cruel treatment and should be prohibited outright, and the European Convention on Human Rights excludes the practice through its own ban on torture. Neither framework, however, carries any real enforcement power over the countries that continue the practice, which is precisely why images out of Aceh keep circulating: international law can condemn caning, but it cannot stop it.
That gap between condemnation and enforcement is exactly what worries Taiwan's human rights advocates about the caning referendum. Taiwan has spent years building a reputation as one of Asia's strongest defenders of human rights and rule of law, a reputation grounded partly in its voluntary adoption of international covenants it cannot formally ratify as a non-UN member. Reviving a punishment that the United Nations equates with torture, critics argue, risks aligning Taiwan's justice system with the same small group of countries, from Iran to Aceh, whose caning practices already draw international condemnation, precisely at a moment when viral images from Indonesia are reminding the world what that punishment actually looks like in practice. （Related： KMT and TPP Leaders Meet, Prepare to Pass Motion of No Confidence ｜ Latest ）
The irony has not been lost on critics of the referendum. Taiwan made history in 2019 as the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, a milestone that came to define the island's international image as a regional leader on human rights and personal freedom. That a country still riding on that reputation is now weighing whether to bring back a punishment the United Nations equates with torture strikes many observers as a jarring contradiction, one that risks undercutting years of hard-won credibility on the very issue that made Taiwan stand out in Asia in the first place.
