Prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁) has been found innocent by the Taipei District Court and won an appeal after being sued for forgery by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), but Ma has again appealed — in his own words, for the sake of human rights. While Ma is entitled to appeal, he must take into account the position he now holds and its responsibilities. Unless his appeal is clearly part of an effort to push judicial reform, he risks being accused of pursuing the case against Hou to cover his own mistakes.
Yet whatever the outcome of his appeal, Ma stands to lose. If he wins his appeal, many will accuse the courts of bowing to the Presidential Office. If he loses, he could still be accused of attempting to meddle in the judiciary or of wasting judicial resources to pursue a personal vendetta.
Ma has said he was wronged during the investigation into how he used his special allowance fund while serving as mayor of Taipei. But the president has not proposed that the Ministry of Justice and Judicial Yuan discuss potential legal reforms to prevent similar situations in the future.
Ma was never detained during the investigation into his case, which has led some to question the decision to detain former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
Ma seems concerned only with the outcome of his own case and not whether others are being mistreated by the judiciary, let alone with concerns that judicial independence and human rights in Taiwan have taken a beating in the past year. Yet these problems have caught the attention of law professor Jerome Cohen, who taught Ma at Harvard University. Cohen has written a number of articles calling on the government to pay attention to reform, but Ma has ignored his advice.
During the first year of Ma’s presidency, Taiwan has struggled with the impact of the global financial crisis. The government has been occupied with bolstering the economy and navigating the treacherous waters of cross-strait relations. Judicial reform is not on the agenda.
It remains unclear what Ma intends to do about the many aspects of the judicial system that are in need of reform.
When former Judicial Yuan president Weng Yueh-sheng (翁岳生) took office in 1999, he convened a national judicial reform conference that drew up a number of proposals, only some of which were implemented. Nor has Weng’s successor, Lai In-jaw (賴英照), made much progress on that front.
Taiwan’s judicial system is in need of reform, from the investigative process and indictment to the trial and sentencing. One of the major questions on the table is the fate of the stalled death penalty system — and the dozens of prisoners that remain on death row with no sign of sentence commutations in sight.
Ma’s government has signed two major international human rights covenants and promised to implement them, but these treaties will be meaningless if judicial reforms do not materialize.
In focusing on Hou, Ma has missed a chance to show greater concern for the nation’s judiciary.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS