The law is the law and must apply to everyone

Taiwanese people seem to have a weird concept of what should be valued and how they should value it. They fluctuate between two extremes -- if you love someone, you want him to live; if you hate him, you desire his death (愛之欲其生,惡之欲其死). As for the law, we show very little respect for it.

As a result, many of those whose job it is to enforce the law rarely try to improve their performance. Instead, they make direct appeals to the people in order to gain support. Those who don't agree with them are easily labeled as not supporting the "sweeping out black-gold" (掃除黑金). Even more odd is that some people seem to stand by these "lawmen." No wonder Taiwan's legal system is so chaotic, people's values have turned upside down and law enforcement officers are so incompetent.

The Taipei District Court recently denied city prosecutors' requests to detain Gary Wang (王令麟), a business tycoon and KMT legislator, and Su Chih-jen (蘇志仁), brother of the former director of the Presidential Office Su Chih-cheng (蘇志誠). I believe this has important lessons for those who are fettered by old conventions. To be more specific, the law is the law. It should never involve the folly that is political correctness. Crimes involving unlawful investigations are no less serious than other crimes.

In Su's case, both the reasons to request and to deny his deten-tion are worth studying. The city prosecutor's request was loaded with Chinese literary terms such as "difficult to pin down" (行蹤飄忽) and "difficult to ascertain" (捉摸不定). No doubt he would have made a great poet or novelist. It contained little about the procedural necessity for detention but much speculation and innuendo.

The Taipei District Court's reasons for denying the detention, on the other hand, which addres-sed the prosecutor's points one by one, seemed more realistic. Thus, the judge was teaching us a lesson, which was not only beneficial to those prosecutors but also to the public whose adoration for them is blind.

There are always people whom we like or dislike in society. The law, however, is the foundation of social procedures and values. It has nothing to do with people's preferences. To function well, a society needs to be built on the basis of universally applied principles, not on people's preferences. Defendants with powerful backgrounds or connections do indeed have advantages, but this is not a reason to sacrifice our principles.

Law enforcement officers should strive constantly to improve their ability to handle their cases appropriately and to achieve the goal epitomized by the old Chinese saying, "As vice rises one foot, so virtue rises ten" (魔高一尺,道高一丈).

Prosecutors are not God. When they cannot see things clearly, it is the judges' duty to help them in order that the legal system operates effectively. The denied requests for Wang's and Su's detention have shown the precise need for them to provide such a function. As for the prosecutors' political game -- accusing the Taipei District Court of obstructing the fight against "black-gold" politics -- such political maneuvers should never happen again.

Nan Fang-shuo is the publisher of The Journalist magazine.

Translated by Eddy Chang