Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) told the Legislative Yuan yesterday that members of Taiwan's media have been abusing their press freedoms.
Chen made the comments during an interpellation session at the legislature yesterday, in which lawmakers across party lines inquired about a recent search of the China Times Express' newsroom by Taipei district prosecutors.
Chen denied that the search had violated freedom of the press.
He also said he disagreed that government departments are given too much latitude when it comes to deciding what constitutes a government secret, and that the search of the Chinese-language daily's newsroom was within government limits.
"What the China Times Express published were transcripts of a criminal investigation, which according to the Code of Criminal Procedure should not be made public.
"Freedom of the press should not be used as an excuse for violation of the law," he said.
The China Times Express on Sept. 30 published excerpts from three interrogation transcripts related to an embezzlement investigation into National Security Bureau chief cashier Liu Kuan-chun (劉冠軍).
Prosecutors searched the newspaper's newsroom and two reporters' homes on Oct. 3 after reporters turned down requests to hand over the documents and identify the source of the leaked information.
Chen said that prosecutors were pursuing public officials who leaked the secret information, and that prosecutors believed the leaked documents could be found at the sites they searched.
Also, Chen said, prosecutors could not rule out the possibility that the reporters may have been accomplices.
Many legislators said yesterday that the prosecutors' power of search and seizure should be stripped and transferred to the court, but Chen disagreed.
According to the law, prosecutors and judges have the power to issue search warrants to empower others or themselves to conduct searches (in which case a warrant is not required.)
"Now the only weapons the prosecutors can use to fight crimes are these two clauses [search and seizure]," Chen said.
A revision of the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1997 took away the power to detain suspects from prosecutors.
The amendment followed a Council of Grand Justices' ruling two years earlier that said it was unconstitutional for prosecutors to detain suspects on their own accord.
In response to the China Times Express search, at least three groups of legislators have proposed amendments that would deny prosecutors the ability to conduct searches without a court order.
Chen said that if prosecutors are stripped of this power and forced to wait for court approval, searches might be delayed and efforts in cracking down on "black gold" hampered.
But many lawmakers disagreed with Chen's objections. Lee Ching-hsiung (
Chen, however, warned that both judges and prosecutors have misused their powers in the past, and that reducing only the power of prosecutors would still leave judges in a position to abuse their power.
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