On Friday last week, a Supreme Court panel reviewed the case of a college professor who was convicted for depositing a National Science Council research subsidy into his private bank account — one of the many cases in which academics have been accused of defrauding the council and academic institutions by obtaining reimbursements under false pretenses. The court ruled that academics cannot be charged with corruption because they are not civil servants.
When professors falsely or fraudulently claim reimbursements from academic institutions, is it just a stopgap solution that they have thought up? Do they do it because they have no other choice? Is it a leftover from a system that made it impossible for them to carry out their research otherwise?
I do not propose discussing these questions. What interests me is the court’s decision that those who are not vested with authority as civil servants cannot face corruption charges.
All people are equal before the law, are they not? When former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), stand before the law, it is not a matter of supporting them or disliking them, is it?
Chen was president for eight years, but Wu, as first lady, never possessed the authority of a civil servant. That being the case, the charge of corruption should not be applicable to her, should it?
Then why did prosecutor Eric Chen (陳瑞仁) charge Wu with corruption on Nov. 3, 2006? Who can explain why, on Dec. 20 last year, the Supreme Court convicted Wu of complicity in corruption in the case concerning the second phase of financial reform? Surely it cannot be claimed that Chen was subservient to Wu and did whatever she said, because no one knows what went on between the couple in private.
Who can claim that if Chen indulged in corruption, Wu must have done the same? After all, a husband and wife stand before the law as two independent individuals. If that were not the case, how could President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), a former minister of justice, say that punishment is not to be inflicted on the wife and children of a convict?
Accordingly, in relation to any corruption case that took place during Chen’s tenure as president, the charge of fraudulently obtaining property under cover of legal authority, as described in the Anti-Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例), clearly cannot be applied to Wu. If the authorities wanted to bring Wu to trial, they should have charged her with something other than corruption.
The reason Taiwanese have so little faith in the judicial system is because those responsible for enforcing the law often interpret it in contradictory ways. The result is that the judiciary is often manipulated, or concedes to being manipulated. Sometimes it does U-turns, and sometimes it shoots at random.
In such circumstances, how could anybody believe in the myth that everybody stands equal before the law?
Chang Kuo-tsai retired as an associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education and is a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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,
RSS