Protest regulations should be revised to remove unreasonable restrictions and reduce police discretion, civic groups said yesterday.
“The Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法) was fundamentally passed in hopes of preventing people from taking to the streets,” said Assembly and Parade Act Amendment Alliance member Chou Yu-hsiu (周宇修), a lawyer.
“The law was originally titled the ‘Assembly and Parade Act for the Period of the Suppression of the Communist Rebellion’ when it was passed, and the title was changed only after martial law was lifted,” he said.
While provisions of the law had been struck down as unconstitutional by the Judicial Yuan last year, the legislature has yet to pass revisions, he said, calling for requirements that demonstrators “apply” to protest be amended to only require “notification.”
While large demonstrations rarely run into difficulties because of the weight of public opinion, small protests on less well-known issues face many restrictions under the act, along with related portions of the Social Order Maintenance Act (SOMA, 社會秩序維護法) and the Criminal Code, he said.
Alliance member Hsu Jen-shou (許仁碩) — a Taiwan Association for Human Rights legal specialist — said that police have shifted toward using SOMA and the Criminal Code to regulate protests, as judges have increasingly struck down lawsuits based on the Assembly and Parade Act.
“Protests should not be viewed as preparation for committing a crime,” he said, calling for the curbing of police discretion to decide protest “red lines.”
Alliance member Lin Ching-how (林靖豪) said that broad police discretion enabled them to use lawsuits to increase the cost of protests, citing “loose” regulations forbidding “obstruction of the execution of public duties,” allowing the arrest of demonstrators sitting in silent protest.
The groups said that police often target protesters who deliver speeches for arrest and prosecution, seeking to “kill a chicken to scare the monkeys” — a Mandarin idiom for making an example out of someone to scare others.
The unwillingness of public prosecutors to take cases against police officers makes its difficult to collect evidence in case of police misconduct, Hsu said, adding that it is often difficult to identify the responsible officers.
The groups also criticized as “unfair” and “undemocratic” requirements that activists post hefty deposits for “road usage” as part of protest applications, saying that the requirement gives an advantage to corporations, which can easily afford to “purchase” “road usage” rights near their offices to block protests.
“The protection of protest rights is a class question,” Taiwan Higher Education Union head organizer Lin Por-yee (林柏儀) said. “Big corporations do not need protest marches because all they have to do to work things out is pick up the phone.”
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