It would have been a lot easier to believe President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) impassioned pledge on Tuesday to push through judicial reform if it hadn’t come after his predecessor was found not guilty of a major corruption charge.
It’s not as if former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) will be able to avoid being behind bars for the foreseeable future — even if he was released from “pre-trial detention” — anytime soon. After all, the Taipei District Court verdict on Friday last week finding Chen, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) and 19 codefendants not guilty of money laundering and graft (in the case of the former first couple) and breach of trust and insider trading (for the others) was followed on Thursday by the Supreme Court upholding a bribery conviction against the couple in a land purchase scandal that will see them serving 11 years.
While the Taipei District Court ruling can be appealed — and the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special Investigation Panel is doing just that — the Supreme Court ruling was the final one for that particular case.
One might even say there was a yin-yang kind of balance to these verdicts, except that comments made by the president, the Presidential Office, senior government officials and lawmakers have been anything but balanced.
There is definitely a kind of black humor to the fact that Ma and his minions keep saying that it would be “inconvenient” or “inappropriate” for him to comment on Chen’s legal battles, and then turn right around and condemn the judicial system and the judge who dared to say there was not enough evidence to convict Chen.
Of course the Presidential Office and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus were equally quick to say on Thursday that they respected the Supreme Court’s decision.
Ma thinks it would be “inconvenient” for him to comment on Chen? What is truly inconvenient for the country is to have a president who claims to want judicial reform, but then says the judiciary must not isolate itself from the outside world or deviate from public expectations. It is inappropriate for Presidential Office Spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) to say that Ma must heed the public’s feelings about judicial reform and yet go on to say with a straight face that Ma would strictly adhere to his constitutional duty and not interfere in any ongoing legal cases regardless of strong public opinion that he should do so.
Ma and the KMT were basically dragged kicking and screaming into supporting legislation to overhaul the way the nation’s judges are selected, trained and retained by a series of corruption scandals this summer implicating several Taiwan High Court judges and a Supreme Court judge that were just too big to be ignored. Now however, the KMT-dominated legislature is suddenly set to embrace the proposal in the wake of the Chen verdicts.
In addition, Ma and the KMT are trying to tar the judge who ruled in Chen’s favor with the same brush they used for those detained this summer — as an example of the kind of judge that needs to be weeded out — while they whip up an almost lynch-mob mentality among their supporters with comments about “ignoring evidence” and “public expectations.” It sounds like they think the qualifications for a judge should be determined by political correctness, not legal ability and the willingness to render verdicts based on evidence and the law alone.
The rule of law is about respecting and obeying the law — regardless of whether you agree with it, not cherry-picking the rules and verdicts you like. For judges, it is about handing down rulings based on the evidence, not about what the public wants.
That might be inconvenient, but it is the truth.
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