Over the last weeks one half of this nation’s political divide has watched with increasing nervousness at the trend of detaining Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) identities without charge in unrelated cases.
On its own, this development might have spoken more of rottenness in the opposition party than a systemic problem with the judiciary, and there is no shortage of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators who argue exactly this. The fact that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has alienated long-time supporters has also allowed his arrest and detention to serve as fodder for his enemies and for anyone who acts as an apologist for judicial bias.
In the context of last week’s visit by Chinese envoys, however, and the mixture of incompetence and smugness with which the government has dealt with subsequent dissent, domestic and international attention on the judiciary’s ability to deliver justice impartially takes on more significance.
This attention can only become more marked if an inventory is drawn up showing the proportion of cases involving KMT figures that await action or that have been inexplicably abandoned.
The judiciary must retain or gain the confidence of a broad majority of Taiwanese — not just an electoral majority — for justice to be done and to be seen to be done. This will be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.
One of the legacies of autocratic rule is a lack of faith in juridical due process — and sometimes even a lack of awareness of its importance.
Democratization should have resulted in the rehabilitation of the judicial system’s credibility, but a lack of momentum for judicial reform and the gross politicization of key cases in recent years has hampered this work and made targets out of prosecutors and judges for both sides of the political spectrum.
The situation has not been helped by the ease with which influential people with current responsibility for judicial matters can produce comments of the utmost irresponsibility — and with impunity. These include the minister of justice and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) himself, who famously declared Chen to be corrupt during the “red shirt” protests — a defamatory act in the absence of evidence — and who subsequently declared his own corruption case to be politically inspired.
Chen’s claim this week that justice is “dead” and that his case amounts to political persecution might have been dismissed as self-interested nonsense were it not for the fact that senior KMT officials have been saying exactly the same thing for years.
The precedent had been set, and Chen has every reason to expect sympathy despite his stupidity — even moreso given that before his indictment prosecutors vowed to resign if they did not get their man, which was an intolerable attack on the presumption of innocence.
All of this reflects the corrosion that has afflicted the public sector under a KMT-dominated legislature and a yoked executive. The erosion of neutrality; a long legislative history of KMT encroachment on agencies that did not follow its party line; the formation of unconstitutional, Star Chamber-like legislative bodies that threatened to take Taiwan back 60 years — this is the mess that the KMT helped to create amid aborted attempts to build something better. And now, the man at the helm of the KMT while much of this took place is the nation’s president.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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