In the early days, the role of the Council of Grand Justices was not given much importance. Over time, their role has changed, beginning with Constitutional Interpretation No. 261 issued on June 21, 1990, which resulted in the re-election of the entire legislature and Taiwan's democratization.
Following that, laws violating individual freedom, the freedom of speech and the principle of gender equality were declared unconstitutional in interpretations by the council, and from that time on, the grand justices have played an important role as guarantors of human rights.
In recent years, the opposition between the pan-green and pan-blue camps and their different views of constitutional politics have resulted in clashes between the government and the legislature. These clashes include the conflicts surrounding the National Communications Commission (NCC), the 319 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Commission and the legislature's right to approve presidential nominations to the Control Yuan. This shows that the grand justices now play a decisive role as guarantors of human rights and in the development of the framework for constitutional politics.
Grand justices are appointed for a period of eight years and cannot be reappointed. Half of them are replaced every four years. The purpose of this design is that a longer term and a ban on reappointments will lead to an independent council free from political intervention. The rule that half of the council shall be replaced every four years allows every president the opportunity to appoint Grand Justices.
Some people now voice concerns because if the current eight nominees are all approved, all grand justices for the next presidential term will have been appointed by the same president. This, however, is a result of the system. This kind of situation does not occur in the US because Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, and the president will only have the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice if an incumbent passes away or resigns. This is very different from our system.
As a reflection of the importance of the grand justices, six non-governmental organizations -- the Taipei Society, the Judicial Reform Foundation, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the Taiwan Law Society, the Taipei Bar Association and the Taiwan Bar Association -- have formed an alliance for the non-governmental supervision of the nominees to the Council of Grand Justices and the Judicial Yuan's president and vice president. Following the president's nominations, the alliance formed a review committee that has interviewed and investigated the nominees and evaluated their moral integrity, academic ability, professional performance, constitutional understanding and human rights ideals. The results will be announced in a report issued in the next few days.
In addition, the alliance has also designed a set of questions related to the duties of the grand justices and submitted it to legislators as a reference for their question and answer session. Finally, the alliance will also form an observation team that will review how the legislature performs its right of approval during the legislative review process.
Finally, I want to call on the legislature to quickly conduct their review of the nominees. We nurture a sincere hope that the legislative review will focus on the nominees' human rights ideals, constitutional understanding and insistence on judicial reform rather than on pan-green and pan-blue ideology or resorting to verbal abuse and personal attacks.
Hawang Shiow-duan is chair of the Taipei Society and political science professor at Soochow University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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