In the two years he has been in office, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has not really been associated personally with many policies. The two exceptions have been his support for the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China and the establishment of an anti-corruption commission. This puts Ma in something of a contradictory position because the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) opposed a draft organic statute for an anti-corruption commission proposed by the Ministry of Justice under the previous Democratic Progressive Party government.
Now that Ma is party chairman, he has co-opted this idea while claiming to want to “create” an anti-corruption commission. Both the laziness of ministry officials and Ma’s changeable moral compass are disappointing in the extreme.
If the government wants to establish an anti-corruption commission, it should do so according to the 10-year-old ministry memorandum.
Despite the high level of consensus that such a commission should be just the first step in the process of judicial reform, Ma has made no indication that he supports this process. Although countless academics, lawyers, judges from courts of first instance and newspaper editorials have all recently urged Ma to take action on judicial reform, these requests seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Ma cares very much about not contradicting himself, so to understand his reticence we need to look at the policy white paper released during his presidential campaign. Its main point in this respect was a desire to make judicial independence a reality.
In the paper, Ma observed that despite several years of judicial reform and the elimination of various irregularities, the fact that the president nominates candidates to the Council of Grand Justices and government agencies continue to influence prosecutors, creates the impression that the judicial system is subject to political pressure and manipulation at all levels.
Ma said that if elected he would review the nomination system for these supposedly independent institutions, to ensure nominees would be chosen based on expertise, integrity and responsibility. He also said political interference should be eliminated from all staff appointments, investigations and sentencing and promised to actively push for judicial reform. These suggestions were all to be part of a concerted campaign to enhance the impartial image of the judiciary in its role as the last line of defense for human rights.
In other words, Ma clearly believes that the judicial duty of the president should be limited to nominating a prosecutor general, a justice minister and a Judicial Yuan president with expertise, integrity and a sense of responsibility and then allowing them to get on with judicial reform.
Given this situation, it seems reasonable to conclude that Ma will not seek to promote judicial reform of his own accord, lest the judiciary is “forever unable to free itself from the control and influence of political forces.”
If this is really what Ma is thinking, then he needs to be reminded that getting the heads of the five branches of government together to promote judicial reform will in no way undermine the independence of the judiciary, because such reforms need the cooperation of all branches of government to succeed. The judiciary should be independent, but not isolated.
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