At the moment, the judicial system is incapable of resolving its own problems. If the president will not take action to rectify this situation then who can?
Furthermore, judicial reform is the first big step toward democratic legitimacy. Every few years people vote in an election or, once in a blue moon, in a referendum. While these actions are extremely important, they are also just the initial stages of democracy, not ends in themselves.
A mature democracy seeks to ensure its citizen’s civil and public rights are protected not just for the duration of an election campaign, but when it is over. In other words, a democracy must guarantee such rights are not encroached on by any person, administrative or judicial institution.
This also means that corrupt politicians who seek to circumvent the law must be brought to justice and that malicious lies be revealed to be just that. Those who have been treated unjustly must be exonerated and collective wounds need to be healed.
To do all this, the courts need to be based on a set of values that all citizens can trust. Only then will they believe that justice is truly blind.
For Ma, who has often declared his interest in democratic reform and put forward ideas as to how reforms might progress, distancing himself from judicial reform is tantamount to giving up on the process.
It has been some time since Lai In-jaw (賴英照) stood down as president of the Judicial Yuan and since then acting president Hsieh Tsai-chuan (謝在全) has made it clear that his provisional status made it impossible for him to promote any major policy changes. In effect this means that the Judicial Yuan is currently unable to make any decisions.
No one knows what mechanism Ma will use to nominate the next Judicial Yuan president and that is a wholly unacceptable situation for any country to find itself in. All we can do is engage in some quid pro quo haggling, informing Ma that if we allow him to establish an anti-corruption commission, then we expect judicial reform in return.
Liu Kung-chung is a research fellow at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae of Academia Sinica, a professor in the Institute of Law for Science and Technology at National Tsing Hua University and a professor in the Graduate Institute of Intellectual Property at National Chengchi University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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