Taiwan's legal system attracts withering criticism from professional and lay quarters, and at times not without reason. Rarely mentioned, however, is the fact that the day-to-day workings of the legal system proceed with little controversy. The need for reform is clear, but for now the fundamentals are attended to and there are mechanisms of appeal in place to protect against error and excess to some degree.
Yesterday saw the start of the release of more than 25,000 prisoners, courtesy of an amnesty lobbied for by acolytes of President Chen Shui-bian (
Recent and controversial overseas examples of executive privilege overriding judges and juries include US President George W. Bush commuting a jail term for White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby ahead of a possible full pardon. Then, yesterday, we saw an example of this process in our region that was applied to a person not yet convicted.
Australian immigration minister Kevin Andrews has used his discretionary powers to revoke the visa of Mohamed Haneef, an Indian doctor who had been detained without charge under special security legislation over alleged links to terrorists in England. Although he was granted bail over the terrorism probe, Haneef will be detained in an immigration detention center until his trial concludes, when he will be convicted as a terrorist of some nature or, in a Kafkaesque scenario, deported as an undesirable if found not guilty.
The online edition of the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday reported that the minister received information from federal police that prompted the decision. But why wasn't this information -- if there actually was any information -- brought to the attention of the court in the first place?
The conduct of the minister might be legal in the strict sense and a potential vote-winner, but it is also an act of impressive contempt for the Australian legal system, and not just because the minister is threatening Haneef's ability to receive a fair trial. The message is loud and clear: On matters of national security or the perception of such, or on anything else, the government will prevail over the courts by any means necessary, and that evidence, innocence and personal reputation count for nothing where foreigners are involved.
In recent years the Australian government has made a mockery of natural justice by creating and revising, on a needs-be basis, laws excising offshore territory for the purposes of limiting the legal options of asylum seekers. This is merely one example of its exploitation of foreigners for political gain at a time of genuine cause for alarm over global terrorism.
The curious thing is that in so many other ways Australia has been and is a generous and just nation to its new arrivals. How mystifying it is, then, that such horse play should send a message to the region that most Australians surely would rather not hear: "Our legal system is not competent to pronounce guilt, so the government shall do so by fiat."
Taiwanese are fortunate not to have a homegrown terror threat. Thus, it is unlikely that Taiwanese will find themselves at the wrong end of an Australian ministerial order canceling a visa on "character" grounds over terrorism fears.
However, this cavalier approach to executive power is not just a sign of things to come, but also a sign of the way things have been developing for some time in Australian federal governance. Given the record of Prime Minister John Howard and his Cabinet in playing dirty politics on immigration and other domestic ethnic difficulties, it is worth keeping an eye out for what will happen next.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs