For decades, Taiwan struggled along without a key lodestone of a true democracy — accountability in the form of checks and balances between the five branches of government, between the various government agencies and between the government or the legislature and the public. Taiwan’s democracy has languished in a kind of never-neverland, where few, if any, politicians and leaders are held accountable for their words and actions, except for the occasional scapegoat.
So now we have a government that promises to consult with and listen to the public on crucial issues affecting the economy and national sovereignty and yet blithely goes on its way negotiating away the country’s future with an enemy that has sworn to bring us down. We’re told that all will be revealed in due time — after an economic cooperation framework agreement is signed with Beijing, and not before — and in the meantime, here are some uninformative advertisements and public forums that only a chosen few are invited to, to keep us busy.
Instead of openness and discussion, we have a government that hides its actions by using administrative orders instead of trying to enact laws that might invite public scrutiny. In just the past two years, 373 administrative orders involving dealings with China have been put into effect without legislative oversight.
Now we have the kind of government that promises to work toward the abolition of the death penalty but rushes through the execution of four men to prove a political point about upholding the law. The kind of government that promises it will try to educate the public about abolition and then says to do so would be fruitless because opinion polls show the majority of the people favor capital punishment. The kind of government where the premier can say executions are necessary to live up to the public’s expectations of the judiciary and yet ignore so many other expectations the public has about the government.
Executions may be legal, but legalities have frequently been ignored, as the Control Yuan found last week in the case of Chiang Kuo-ching (江國慶), 14 years after he was executed for something it now appears he may not have done. He was convicted and executed on the basis of a confession obtained after a 37-hour-long interrogation and questionable forensic evidence.
While Chiang was tried in a military court, there are plenty of examples of equally questionable convictions handed down in civilian courts. Far too often, as death penalty cases bounce from one court to the next, the overriding concern at each level appears to be to preserve a facade of justice and the reputations of the prosecutors and police, not the rights of the accused.
A visible reminder of what happens when a society lacks even the facade of checks and balances can be found on Green Island, where a new exhibition opened last week at the New Life Correction Center. The only thing that really needed to be corrected during the center’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s was the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) conviction that people who didn’t agree with it or sought more public accountability were enemies to be ground down, if not stamped out. Thousands of people lost their basic rights and many lost their lives during the era of martial law.
Taiwan has come a long way since martial law was lifted, but as the past year has shown, it still has a long way to go. Time has shown us that we can’t wait for the government to institute change that threatens established bureaucratic practices. The public must demand accountability from each and every institution and from each and every politician and keep demanding it until it is received.
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