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EDITORIAL: Double
standards of the judiciary
One would think that the judiciary, having come under much criticism for a
perceived lack of impartiality, would work to restore the public’s dwindling
confidence. However, it has continued to amaze the public with its blatant bias.
On Friday, Cho Po-chung (卓伯仲), the younger brother of Changhua County
Commissioner Cho Po-yuan (卓伯源), was charged with colluding with business groups
to illegally pocket NT$49 million (US$1.6 million) in the county government’s
procurement of environmentally friendly shopping bags.
As the indictment also charged Cho Po-chung with embezzling NT$24 million from
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) presidential campaign office during last year’s
presidential election, suggesting that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might
not have been honest in submitting its declaration of funds received during Ma’s
election campaign.
According to the report published by the Control Yuan in July last year, Ma and
Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) of the KMT received NT$446 million in donations
in the presidential election last year. The expenditure for the Ma-Wu ticket was
NT$444 million, with the final balance standing at NT$2.2 million, the report
said.
The Ma-Wu ticket won the election against then-Democratic Progressive Party
presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and her running mate, Su Jia-chyuan
(蘇嘉全), who declared with the Control Yuan that their fundraising campaign had
raised NT$756 million.
The Political Donations Act (政治獻金法) clearly stipulates that candidates are
required to report all campaign spending.
However, Ying Pao-kuo (應寶國), the accountant of the Ma-Wu ticket’s national
campaign headquarters at the time, was quoted in Cho Po-chung’s indictment as
saying that “among the receipts filed by its Changhua campaign office, some,
given their large amount, were not reported to the Control Yuan.”
The indictment said that 1,300 sets of plates were distributed as campaign
memorabilia during the campaign period, each costing NT$91 — an amount that runs
against the Ministry of Justice’s regulation that campaign paraphernalia cannot
exceed a price tag of NT$30. NT$30 was also the standard by which the ministry
dispatched prosecutors nationwide to probe for vote-buy allegations.
This seems to suggest that the Ma-Wu ticket’s Changhua campaign office might
have violated the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act
(總統副總統選舉罷免法), yet the public has yet to hear from the Control Yuan or judicial
agencies about probing the case involving Ma.
In contrast to the apparent inaction of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office Special
Investigation Division (SID) and agencies to investigate the seeming
inconsistencies, the public, meanwhile, is bewildered by the judiciary’s skewed
sense of justice after it was reported that three Taiwan Solidarity Union
officials have been indicted for contempt of authority for calling the SID “SID
pigs” during a protest in May last year.
These incidents give the public a pathetic impression. Prosecutors respond to
criticism of negligence by charging the accusers with “contempt of authority,”
while not a word is uttered about clues that may lead to bigger cases involving
the top echelon of the KMT.
This brazen double standard is downright despicable, and a growing number of
Taiwanese fear that an Internet joke that “you will be all right [and avoid any
judiciary prosecution] as long as you possess a KMT membership” may have started
ringing true.
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