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The urgency of judicial reform
By Chu Hei-yuan Huang Kuo-chang 瞿海源，黃國昌
Friday, Jul 23, 2010, Page 8
On July 14, 1789, the day of the storming of the Bastille,
King Louis XVI wrote “Nothing” in his diary. Today, as we review President Ma
Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) achievement on “judicial reform” since he took office more
than two years ago, he has done, if not “nothing,” then “almost nothing.”
Over half of the respondents to the second social attitudes survey conducted by
Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology in 2008 believed Taiwan’s judicial
system was unjust and that court rulings were generally unfair.
In an open letter published on March 20 last year, the Taipei Society urged the
Ma administration to review what had been achieved in the wake of the 1999
National Conference on Judicial Reform, and expressed the hope that the
government would continue to push resolutely for reform.
In July last year, Academia Sinica’s Institutum Iurisprudentiae held a
conference entitled “Tenth Anniversary of the National Conference on Judicial
Reform: Retrospect and Prospect.” Representatives from a variety of backgrounds
discussed the development of a system for assessing and firing judges and
prosecutors, a project that remains in limbo. They said Ma should use his
presidential powers to facilitate better coordination between government
agencies, avoid departmentalism and remove obstacles to reform.
Finally, representatives of legal and social organizations visited Ma late last
year to express the public’s great desire for reform. They requested that Ma
learn from Japan and establish a judicial reform committee to push
systematically for reform.
Judicial reformists are frustrated that Ma, while listening to their calls, has
chosen to respond like a typical bureaucrat. Other than passing the problem on
to the Judicial Yuan and the Ministry of Justice, he appears to have taken no
action at all.
Ma seems to have conveniently forgotten that he supported the establishment of a
judicial reform alliance during the 2008 presidential campaign and signed a
seven-point reform declaration in which he made several promises, including
support for a diversified and professional assessment system for judges and
prosecutors.
After a case of alleged corruption involving Taiwan High Court judges recently
hit the front pages, judicial reform, in which the media has heretofore shown
little if any interest, is suddenly all anyone can talk about.
As president, it is Ma’s responsibility to take a more long term view of
problems and to avoid acting with the same short-term perspective media pundits
embrace. To only recognize the seriousness of a problem when it spins out of
control has to be considered bad government.
Even the media now understand that major judicial reform can be delayed no
longer, but all Ma could manage was to say that concrete methods should be
employed when pushing for reform, and that a proposed judges’ act is crucial to
the assessment and withdrawal of judges and prosecutors.
This was a missed opportunity, inasmuch as simply saying something that is
widely know achieved nothing. Regardless of the intent behind this statement, it
just goes to prove the words of Martin Luther King: “Nothing in the world is
more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Former Judicial Yuan president Lai In-jaw (賴英照) was proud of pushing the Speedy
Criminal Trials Act (刑事妥速審判法) through the legislature in April and said he
actively supported the judges’ act. Lai was forced to resign in the face of
widespread public displeasure over the alleged corruption case involving Taiwan
High Court judges. However, Ma remains a little too self-satisfied over his
record on judicial reform, bragging that the act was passed on his watch, and
that the Cabinet has already drafted the judges’ act, which is currently being
discussed with the Examination Yuan. Despite these achievements, we remain
extremely disappointed with Ma’s achievements in this area to date.
Although the judges’ act will not be a panacea for judicial reform, if Lai had
to step down to take responsibility, then Ma, who is ultimately in charge should
surely shoulder even more of the blame. After all, when the Judicial Yuan pushed
for the judges’ act in the past, it came under pressure from both the
prosecutorial system and the Examination Yuan, not to mention those legislators
who passively objected to the law on the basis of their own personal interests.
Although Lai should take responsibility for repeated delays in passing the
judges’ act, Ma doubles as chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT),
which holds almost three-quarters of the seats in the legislature. It is hard to
escape the conclusion that he could have gotten such a bill passed if he really
wanted to.
Ma has done everything necessary to ensure the controversial Economic
Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China is passed, despite strenuous
opposition. How could it be that a draft bill requiring the monitoring and
disqualification of judges, which has considerable public support, could be left
to languish in this way? If Lai resigned over the delay, then what should Ma do?
If Ma continues to display a lack of concern for judicial reform, he should
refrain from proposing any judicial reform policies when seeking re-election in
2012. Any such proposal would inevitably lead to questions about why he has
singularly failed to implement such policies so far.
Chiu Hei-yuan is a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s
Institute of Sociology. Huang Kuo-chang is chairman of the Taipei Society.
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