Over the last weeks one half of this nation’s political divide has watched with increasing nervousness at the trend of detaining Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) identities without charge in unrelated cases.
On its own, this development might have spoken more of rottenness in the opposition party than a systemic problem with the judiciary, and there is no shortage of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators who argue exactly this. The fact that former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has alienated long-time supporters has also allowed his arrest and detention to serve as fodder for his enemies and for anyone who acts as an apologist for judicial bias.
In the context of last week’s visit by Chinese envoys, however, and the mixture of incompetence and smugness with which the government has dealt with subsequent dissent, domestic and international attention on the judiciary’s ability to deliver justice impartially takes on more significance.
This attention can only become more marked if an inventory is drawn up showing the proportion of cases involving KMT figures that await action or that have been inexplicably abandoned.
The judiciary must retain or gain the confidence of a broad majority of Taiwanese — not just an electoral majority — for justice to be done and to be seen to be done. This will be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.
One of the legacies of autocratic rule is a lack of faith in juridical due process — and sometimes even a lack of awareness of its importance.
Democratization should have resulted in the rehabilitation of the judicial system’s credibility, but a lack of momentum for judicial reform and the gross politicization of key cases in recent years has hampered this work and made targets out of prosecutors and judges for both sides of the political spectrum.
The situation has not been helped by the ease with which influential people with current responsibility for judicial matters can produce comments of the utmost irresponsibility — and with impunity. These include the minister of justice and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) himself, who famously declared Chen to be corrupt during the “red shirt” protests — a defamatory act in the absence of evidence — and who subsequently declared his own corruption case to be politically inspired.
Chen’s claim this week that justice is “dead” and that his case amounts to political persecution might have been dismissed as self-interested nonsense were it not for the fact that senior KMT officials have been saying exactly the same thing for years.
The precedent had been set, and Chen has every reason to expect sympathy despite his stupidity — even moreso given that before his indictment prosecutors vowed to resign if they did not get their man, which was an intolerable attack on the presumption of innocence.
All of this reflects the corrosion that has afflicted the public sector under a KMT-dominated legislature and a yoked executive. The erosion of neutrality; a long legislative history of KMT encroachment on agencies that did not follow its party line; the formation of unconstitutional, Star Chamber-like legislative bodies that threatened to take Taiwan back 60 years — this is the mess that the KMT helped to create amid aborted attempts to build something better. And now, the man at the helm of the KMT while much of this took place is the nation’s president.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
By now, most of Taiwan has heard Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) threats to initiate a vote of no confidence against the Cabinet. His rationale is that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-led government’s investigation into alleged signature forgery in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) recall campaign constitutes “political persecution.” I sincerely hope he goes through with it. The opposition currently holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan, so the initiation of a no-confidence motion and its passage should be entirely within reach. If Chiang truly believes that the government is overreaching, abusing its power and targeting political opponents — then
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
RSS