The Legislative Yuan should implement more rigorous review procedures before approving future nominations to the Council of Grand Justices by president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), civil rights activists said yesterday.
A number of groups, including the Judicial Reform Foundation, Taipei Society and Taiwan Association for Human Rights, issued a joint call for future nominees to be subject to more detailed questioning during the confirmation process, including filling out detailed questionnaires and personally participating in individual hearings, in addition to being collectively questioned by the general legislative session.
“We hope that the Legislative Yuan can change the review process to make it more dignified,” Judicial Reform Foundation executive director Kao Jung-chih (高榮志) said, criticizing as perfunctory a review process that he said provides little time or opportunity for substantive questioning of nominees.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“As Grand Justices have the last word in our constitutional government, they have to be willing to shoulder responsibility and let the people know where they stand,” Kao said.
“The Legislative Yuan in the past has often simply gone through the motions in approving nominations,” said Tamkang University public administration professor Tu Yu-yin (涂予尹), a Taiwan Democracy Watch board member. “We are skeptical that it is possible to perform a substantial review of nominees in such a short amount of time.”
He urged Tsai to support constitutional changes to more evenly stagger justice terms, adding that she would be able to nominate 11 of the 15 members of the council during her term.
A Legislative Yuan controlled by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) had refused to approve four nominees by former DPP president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) late in his last term, paving the way for President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), a KMT member, to make the nominations shortly after taking office, he said.
Those judges threw off the previous staggering of terms because their eight-year terms were calculated from when they took office, rather than being tied directly to the terms of their predecessors, he said, adding that allowing a president to nominate a super-majority of justices in a single term was “dangerous.”
“As the DPP already has control over the legislative and executive branches, nominating a majority of the Council of Grand Justices would serve as a kind of ‘insurance’ against political enemies, by making the success of any constitutional challenge to legislation less likely,” he said.
The judicial nominations have drawn scrutiny because of the likelihood of legal challenges to proposed legislation om the KMT’s “ill-gotten” assets.
All current grand justices were nominated by Ma, with the terms of the four justices nominated early in his first terms set to expire in October. There have also been calls for the president and vice president of the Judicial Yuan, who also serve on the council, to follow precedent and resign to make way for nominations by the new president.
DPP Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋), who serves as the convener of the DPP’s congressional reform small working group, criticized past general assembly questioning for only allowing individual legislators 15 minutes to question multiple nominees.
“You cannot really learn anything about a nominee’s constitutional and legal views under the current questioning system,” he said.
The DPP plans to pass amendments to the Act Governing the Exercise of Legislative Power (立法院職權行使法) to require at least a month before nominees are approved and to mandate new hearings allowing extended questioning of individual nominees, he added.
The proposal would also do away with anonymous voting on nominations and instead require legislators to register their votes, he said.
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