New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) has proposed reinstating the long abolished Special Investigation Division (SID) to combat corruption if elected president. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) also held a news conference backing the policy.
However, the proposal goes against the trend of law enforcement in democratic countries around the world.
Taiwan is not the only nation to have had a special investigation division. Other democratic countries did as well. Over the years, they have found that judicial entities similar to Taiwan’s SID brought with them several risks and vulnerabilities, including abuse of power and political interference. As a result, most countries have abolished the system.
The US once had an independent counsel — an independent prosecutor distinct from the US Department of Justice’s attorney-general — who provided reports to the US Congress.
However, Americans opposed the system because its performance was underwhelming and it interfered in politics. Consequently, Congress abolished the independent counsel statute on June 30, 1999.
Japan also has a special investigation section, but it falls under the local prosecutors’ office, which reduces the possibility of an overconcentration of power in the hands of a few prosecutors, as was the case in Taiwan.
Another case in point is South Korea’s former Central Investigation Department, which ran for 32 years. It was abolished in April, 2013, due to concerns about its involvement in politics.
If Hou has had a good grasp of the law and judicial trends around the world, he would know that entities such as the former SID have been attacked over concerns such as an overconcentration of power and unfair investigations. From the US abolishing its independent counsel, Japan ensuring that its special investigation section falls under the local prosecutors’ office to South Korea abolishing the Central Investigation Department, it is apparent that the SID would be anachronistic if resurrected.
If the governing party were in favor of Hou’s out-of-date proposal, President Tsai ing-wen (蔡英文) would actually stand to benefit from it. If the investigative approaches of the SID — led by then-prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) during former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration — were still in place, Tsai could enjoy the “perks” that Ma did.
She could be acquitted by the High Court as Ma was, when he was accused of leaking classified information and breaching telecommunications security laws because of wiretaps conducted in 2013.
She could listen to the SID’s wiretapping of Hou, and summon the secretary-general to the president and the premier to the Presidential Office to coordinate as the investigation would involve the vertical separation of powers.
Next, the SID could hold a news conference to expose Hou’s wiretapped communications in the most sensational way.
In the “September strife” scandal in 2013, the SID was found to have placed the telephone numbers of unrelated cases under a single wiretapping warrant. If SID were to follow the same approach and wiretap all of Hou’s contacts and associates related to his hundred-room property using a single warrant, Tsai would also receive this “fruitful” surveillance.
The purpose of this hypothesis was to underscore Hou’s ignorance and how anachronistic his proposal is.
It is also laudable that Tsai’s administration chose the “self-defeating” option of abolishing the SID to prevent it from becoming a political weapon.
For Taiwan’s legal system to be in lockstep with the world, the SID should never be allowed to return.
Huang Di-ying is a lawyer and chairman of the Taiwan Forever Association.
Translated by Rita Wang
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