It may not rank among the most substantial news stories of the year, but yesterday’s decision by the Kaohsiung District Court to refuse an adoption request by an American couple for a developmentally disabled Taiwanese girl was a stunning example of how Taiwanese justice can resemble a drunken crap shoot.
The would-be parents, whose excellent educational credentials proved to be their downfall, can appeal, but for the rest of us the real question is what caliber of people are being appointed to serve as arbiters of the law.
The court effectively said that the couple, both Harvard graduates and doctorate holders, were at risk of abandoning or otherwise mistreating the child because she was likely to fail to live up to their expectations.
If a court, with such astonishingly disconnected reasoning, alienates people of goodwill who would embrace the disadvantaged, and in so doing condemn a child to a life in institutional “care” instead of a life of caring, what possible confidence can be had in verdicts that turn on genuine legal expertise and that receive tremendous media and political pressure?
Certainly, the Special Investigation Panel (SIP) probing former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has little confidence in the Taiwan District Court, whose decision confirming Chen’s release, pending trial, may go to yet another appeal.
The SIP would appear to be eager to exploit a loophole that allows apparently indefinite appeals based on new evidence or on the details of a separate “case” involving the same suspect. What this means is that the SIP could appeal Chen’s release indefinitely, which, even absent a court verdict, makes a mockery of the spirit of double jeopardy, though we doubt if the prosecutors care.
Meanwhile, the SIP’s colleagues over at the Bureau of Investigation have been hard at work tracking down the profligate and the venal. The latest suspect is Chen Tsung-yi (陳宗逸), news desk head at the defunct New Taiwan Weekly, a pro-independence magazine.
What we cannot understand is how a “corruption investigation” would prompt the bureau’s staff to allegedly probe Chen Tsung-yi’s knowledge of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), a Washington NGO that serves as an advocate for Taiwan, about the North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association or whether Chen had studied overseas.
With these various incidents, the perception that public institutions are prone to incompetence and/or serving partisan interests can only harden. Those with the dreadful, direct experience of harassment by security forces in previous decades will also react to Chen Tsung-yi’s allegations with outrage and fear. This fear — rational or otherwise — can only be compounded by Chen Tsung-yi’s claim that all four of the agents who entered his home were Mainlanders.
The details of the last incident need to be verified, but for now, it appears that Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) is in danger of seeing yet another discrediting incident call both her leadership and the conduct of her investigative staff into question.
Professor Jerome Cohen, President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) eminent former teacher, has called for an investigation into Taiwanese judicial practices. Each week seems to bring more compelling and urgent reasons for this to happen.
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