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Accountability key to
democracy
By Hsia Hsiao-chuan 夏曉鵑
For the past two years, protests against land expropriation have occurred across
Taiwan. The wave of discontent and questions has taken aim at what is seen as
the inferiority and unsuitability of the Land Expropriation Act (土地徵收條例), which
led to a recent amendment by the legislature. However, the amended law will not
put an end to the controversy, it will add to it.
The public have long made forceful demands for the protection of designated
agricultural zones, but because of major infrastructure projects approved by the
Cabinet, among other reasons, these areas can still be developed at will.
Many ongoing disputes, such as the ones over farmland in Dapu Village (大埔) in
Miaoli County’s Jhunan Township (竹南), the Siangsihliao (相思寮) area of Changhua
County’s Erlin Township (二林) and over the Puyu development project in Hsinchu
County’s Jhubei Township (竹北), are major infrastructure construction projects
approved by the Cabinet, giving us a hint of how this label is being misused.
The result is that the regulations about the protection of designated farmland
in the new legislation are but skin deep — an empty formality.
At the level of practical public participation, the new legislation refuses to
incorporate a system for public hearings. This is something that people have
been calling for and that would give the public and the government an
opportunity to engage in real debate.
The new legislation only allows for public hearings in cases where a designated
agricultural zone will be expropriated for use in a major infrastructure project
approved by the Cabinet and when that expropriation is “controversial.”
However, being controversial is an abstract and ambiguous concept, and without
clear standards, it will unfortunately be at the discretion of the Cabinet to
decide when a public hearing is required.
In terms of compensation, the new legislation refuses to let real-estate
evaluators make objective expert appraisals and instead lets local governments,
which frequently are also the expropriating party, determine the market value.
With the local government being both player and referee, any talk about “market
value” becomes mere wordplay.
To add insult to injury, even in the case of this kind of “market value,” the
new legislation says that the implementation date should be decided by the
Cabinet. In other words, so long as the Cabinet has not set an implementation
date, even expropriation at the market value set by the expropriating authority
itself will be unachievable.
In addition, “early tender” development, through which a bid process is held
before the expropriation has been approved and that lacks legal basis, remains
unregulated in the new legislation.
In a democracy with its diversity of values, the pursuit of substantial
democracy is always a difficult matter. This is precisely the reason why
procedural justice is fundamental and crucial.
The fundamental aim of a land expropriation system is to regulate and provide a
legitimate procedure for expropriations, and to guarantee the equal treatment of
the public in the process is its main task.
However, a look at the amendment to the expropriation act reveals no effort
toward procedural justice. Not only that, the amendment tramples all over
procedural justice and humiliates the idea. This process is not the result of
the rule of law that one expects in a democratic state; in fact, it is the
backsliding of democracy.
One of the main ingredients in a healthy democracy is accountability, but that
has been left far behind by the current implementation of the legislative and
executive powers.
Many legislators do not even understand the meaning of legal bills and they only
follow the executive’s lead, in effect becoming a rubber stamp for the
executive.
The executive uses this to take over legislative powers that should belong to
the legislature to push behind the scenes for several preposterous legal bills
that violate procedural justice without being held accountable for doing so.
The same is true for the aforementioned amendment that, while formally passed by
the legislature, was in fact orchestrated by the Cabinet.
In addition to this amendment, we have also seen how the shadow dancers in the
Cabinet have shouted slogans about residential justice and land justice in
relation to urban renewal policies, the Eastern Development Act (東部發展條例) and the
early tender policy, while they have in fact sacrificed the public’s rights to a
place to live and a stable job.
The question of how to bring about a politics of accountability is currently the
greatest challenge to Taiwan’s democracy.
Hsia Hsiao-chuan is a professor and director of the Graduate Institute for
Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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