President Ma Ying-jeou declared that "change had arrived" during a news conference held May 19 to mark the second anniversary of the inaugural of his Chinese Nationalist Party government.
However, change, at least for the better, has been noteworthy only for its absence in Taiwan's judiciary, the last line of defense for justice in our society, despite the high-profile prosecution of former president Chen Shui-bian on corruption charges.
Indeed, the majority of Taiwan's people appear to have given Ma a failing grade in this critical area, according to an Internet survey conducted jointly by the Judicial Reform Foundation and Yahoo on the concerns of the ordinary public on the judiciary.
Although Internet opinion polls are self-selective and hence less reliable than random sampling, the results of the JRF-Yahoo poll are nonetheless troubling.
For example, first among the list of citizen complaints was "the inability to remove judges and prosecutors who are clearly unfit," which was selected by 33.6 percent of the 8,327 persons who participated in the survey.
This finding matches the concern expressed by former Judicial Yuan president Weng Yueh-sheng, the teacher of both Chen and Ma at the National Taiwan University law school, who recently expressed profound regret for the fact that Taiwan had never legislated a law to regulate judges.
Sadly, Ma has yet to take to heart the words of his former mentor and has yet to use his concurrent status as president and KMT chairman to push the ruling party to use its nearly three - quarters legislative majority to pass the draft law on judges, which has remained mired in the KMT-controlled Legislative Yuan for 23 years.
One possible reason is quite simply that the KMT is now back in possession of control over the courts, which a former KMT secretary-general crowed in the 1990s "are owned by the KMT" and thus the importance of a clear legal framework for the regulation of judges seems have lost urgency.
After all, a clear law regulating judges may have been inconvenient when the Chen Shui-bian case was suddenly passed administratively by the Taipei District Court from a judge specializing in financial crime to another judge who cited neo-confucian morality in his subsequent guilty judgment.
Nearly 23 percent of citizens who participated in the JRF-Yahoo Internet poll complained about the widespread, detailed and frequently inaccurate and slanderous news media coverage of criminal investigations well before prosecutors have completed their probes, presumably through "leaks" to reporters by prosecutors or investigators.
Another 11.3 percent criticized the habitual practice of prosecutors of detaining suspects for months in order to "squeeze out a confession."
These two items combined indicate deep dissatisfaction with the actions of prosecutors among 34.1 percent of the respondents.
In response to these two complaints, Deputy Justice Minister Chen Shou-huang intoned that the Ministry of Justice already has strictly enjoined prosecutors not to violate the principle of the confidentiality of investigations and not to use punitive methods to extract confessions and affirmed that the MOJ already has an evaluation and punishment system for unfit prosecutors.
Reversing course
Nevertheless, "ordinary people" can read in newspapers innumerable stories based on "private" statements made by prosecutors on such investigations, but have yet to see any news on how many prosecutors have been sanctioned, demoted or cashiered for violating this fundamental legal principle.
The MOJ should therefore be surprised if "ordinary people" conclude that the problem lies in the lack of interest from the top in bringing errant prosecutors and investigators to heel or for suspecting that such violators of judicial ethics have the tacit backing of the KMT government.
One judicial measure implemented by Ma for which he received populist support and international condemnation was his decision to override the scruples of his first justice minister Wang Ching-feng and appoint a former prosecutor Tseng Yung-fu who promptly ended Taiwan's five year moratorium on executions by signing execution orders for four of the 44 convicts on Taiwan's death row even though a class action appeal on the constitutionality of the death sentence is now before the Council of Grand Justices.
In a sad irony, the Control Yuan also released in mid-May the results of its investigation into the prosecution of a child rape-murder case in 19996 in which the Ministry of National defense counterintelligence team used illegal methods to torture a confession out of a suspected soldier, Chiang Kuo-qing, who was subsequently convicted and executed for a crime he did not commit.
This frightening example of grossly inhumane and now irreparable injustice toward Chiang again stands as evidence of the failure to end martial law era interrogation habits among the military and police and should again cast doubt on the wisdom of resuming the implementation of death sentences in direct contradiction to world standards adopted into our domestic law with the ratification of two international human rights covenants last year.
The JRF-Yahoo poll should remind Ma that Taiwan is not the People's Republic of China and that the complaints of "ordinary people" over the KMT's retrograde course may be expressed in polling booths in 2012.
Source: Taiwan News Online - Editorial 2010/05/27
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