In response to public anger over the corruption case allegedly involving several Taiwan High Court judges, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and former Judicial Yuan president Lai In-jaw (賴英照) described themselves as “furious.” Ma even announced the establishment of an anti-corruption agency he and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators had rejected several times in the past.
“Fury” is what you feel when you suddenly encounter shockingly bad news. Corruption among Taiwanese judges, however, has long been a matter of public knowledge. Both Ma and Lai come from legal backgrounds. Ma is a former minister of justice, and Lai has served as grand justice and president of the Judicial Yuan. Despite this, they both gave the impression that they were hearing of this problem for the first time and that was why they reacted in a way that seemed a tad contrived.
Acting is part of politics and if it led to real reform it wouldn’t matter, but these reforms could easily be just as unsubstantial as Ma’s previous attempts.
Before his resignation, Lai claimed the problem was so serious that he would need two months to come up with a reform plan. The fact is, however, that an effective plan was drawn up under former Judicial Yuan president Weng Yueh-sheng (翁岳生) some time ago. He proposed the judges’ act to deal with criminal litigation and amendments to the Court Organization Act (法院組織法). These mutually complementary measures have been discussed in the legislature for several years and received widespread support from both academics and judicial reformists.
As such measures affect the vested interests of many judges and prosecutors, they worked hand in hand with the KMT to block them in the legislature.
The proposed judges’ act, for example, was blocked mainly by prosecutors and the Examination Yuan, but after concessions by the latter and the Ministry of Justice in 2007, it passed its first legislative reading. Unfortunately, the KMT legislative caucus then decided to block the second reading.
Then KMT Legislator Chen Chien-min (陳健民) led opposition to these bills and as a result was recruited to the party think tank and later appointed to the Control Yuan.
After former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in 2007 replaced Weng with Lai, who has a good understanding of how officialdom works, the reform push stopped. As public complaints surged over major corruption cases and the judiciary undermining human rights, Ma and Lai began a push for cosmetic populist reform on the pretext of looking after the interests of legal professionals.
Ma’s masterstroke was to turn the law demanding that government officials declare the sources of their wealth into a law decriminalizing failure to make such a declaration. Lai rejected the fundamental reorganization of the criminal litigation process and the Court Organization Act. Instead, he jumped behind the superficial Speedy Criminal Trials Act (刑事妥速審判法), which became law in April. These are typical examples of false reform.
The recently discovered need to establish an anti-corruption commission is yet another example. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has been praised as a good example for all developing nations. In terms of its authority, however, it is nothing more than a single-issue investigative bureau. Hong Kong established the ICAC in 1974 because it did not have an investigation bureau. The ICAC is useful because of several other complementary measures.
First, the ICAC falls directly under the jurisdiction of the chief executive, giving it high status and considerable powers.
Second, it is an independent agency free of interference from other agencies, while still being subject to external supervision.
Third, its staff do not come from inside the existing bureaucracy and can thus sidestep personal loyalties. Finally, it is supported by a law requiring that individuals declare the sources of their wealth.
The anti-corruption commission proposed by Ma lacks all these complementary provisions; It is to fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, making it a fourth-level organization under the president, the premier and the minister of justice. Second, it is not an independent agency and there is no external supervisory mechanism. Furthermore, most of the staff would apparently be transferred from government ethics offices or the Cabinet’s Central Taiwan Joint Services. The ethics offices replaced earlier “second personnel offices” under which “thought police” arrested alleged communists or pro-independence activists. The joint services were established to find positions for civil servants no one wanted after the provincial government was abolished. Both were established to take on idle staff in response to changing times, and their expertise falls far short of current investigators. Finally, officials failing to declare the sources of their wealth has been decriminalized.
Without such complementary measures, the anti-corruption commission will be no different from the existing Investigation Bureau. Compared with Hong Kong’s ICAC, it has no teeth and its functions appear similar to that of a special investigation team but with a much lower status and less power. What, then, is the point?
Taiwan’s problem is that officials and judges often cover for each other. However, most are quite clean, and corruption is not endemic as some believe. There really is no need to waste national resources on the establishment of an agency with 400 staff to handle the problem outside the existing prosecutorial and investigative system.
Public anger following the revelation of the judges’ alleged corruption could be used to create impetus for large-scale reform. However, it seems the Ma administration once again prefers to support bogus reform as a way of protecting vested interests, satisfying populist demands and promoting unneeded officials, all in the name of reform. In this way, the Ma administration successfully kills four birds with one stone.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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