It is commonplace in workplaces and companies around the globe during celebrations for members of staff to perform a play or song poking fun at their superiors for the enjoyment of their colleagues.
It is an entirely different matter when prosecutors involved in the highest-profile and most politically sensitive trial in the nation’s history — the upcoming trial of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) — use such an occasion to poke fun at the defendant.
But this was the case on Sunday, when in an apparent “celebration” of Law Day, prosecutors — some of them directly involved in Chen’s case — performed a skit in which a detainee raised her handcuffed hands and shouted “judicial persecution,” openly mocking the former president, much to the amusement of an audience that included senior judges and prosecutors.
All the more perturbing was that the writer of the skit, Taipei’s Chief Prosecutor Ching Chi-jen (慶啟人), who visited Switzerland and Singapore last year as part of the investigation into the allegations of money-laundering against the former first family, seemed to think there was nothing wrong with her behavior.
One might expect State Prosecutor-General Chen Tsung-ming (陳聰明), whose job it is to review the handling of cases and to discipline prosecutors, or Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) would order disciplinary action over such an act, except it appears that Wang was herself a member of the audience.
Wang tried to brush off concerns about the incident at a press conference on Wednesday, dismissing the play as something to “help everybody relax,” adding that “there’s no reason to take it too seriously.”
Already under intense domestic and international scrutiny following the well-documented series of irregularities that have taken place during the investigation and the court proceedings, one might think prosecutors would have more sense than to bring even more unwanted attention to themselves.
But no, the arrogance of these people seems to know no bounds, while professionalism and judicial ethics have apparently gone out of the window.
Even more worrying than this latest sideshow, however, is the continued silence of the Ma administration.
Repeated statements from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) that he “respects the independence of the judiciary” are little comfort when it is clear that increasing numbers of the general public have no faith in it whatsoever.
For a government that appears hyper-sensitive to even the slightest criticism from overseas, the administration’s refusal to take action against such glaring challenges to the independence, impartiality and competence of the judiciary following numerous expressions of concern can only be interpreted as tacit approval of all that has gone on.
Respected Asian law academic and Ma’s mentor during his studies at Harvard University, Jerome Cohen, wrote before this latest episode that recent court proceedings in the former president’s case “have mocked the promise” that Chen will receive a fair trial.
By mocking the former president in such a callous manner, prosecutors have not only vindicated Cohen’s concerns, but also made a mockery of the entire judicial system.
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,
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
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
RSS