It is hard to know which scenario is more outrageous: That President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration nominated Supreme Court Judge Shao Yen-ling (邵燕玲) for a seat on the Council of Grand Justices despite her role in one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings in recent years or that it was apparently ignorant of the controversy. Either way, it appears that someone on the Harvard Law School-educated president’s team failed to perform proper due diligence.
Even though Shao declined the nomination and Ma quickly named a replacement, this issue goes to the heart of the selection process for a position on the bench of the nation’s top court. It also raises questions, once again, about Ma’s administrative abilities and attention to detail, or lack thereof.
Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), who led the task force that came up with candidates for the four grand justice seats that will be vacant in the fall, said his group spent 18 days drawing up a list of 32 potential candidates and short-listed nine of them for Ma, who then picked the final four. Both Ma and Siew have apologized for Shao’s nomination, although the president said on his Facebook page that he did not learn about the controversy surrounding Shao until Thursday morning.
Presidential Office spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) hedged when pressed about how Shao’s name made it onto the shortlist and whether Ma had been aware of her ruling that aroused such outrage. It’s hard to believe the denials given the Presidential Office statement issued on Sept. 25 last year, when thousands of people rallied in front of it on Ketagalan Boulevard in a protest organized by the “White Rose Movement” against incompetent judges. Ma had heard the movement’s call, the statement said, and would push for the swift passage of a draft bill to regulate the certification, performance and ethics of judges, as well as tougher penalties for child molesters.
That protest was in direct response to two cases — one before the Supreme Court and one before the Kaohsiung District Court — that found the attackers of two young girls (aged three and six) should be tried on the lesser charge of statutory rape (having sex with a person under the age of 14), instead of sexual assault, because prosecutors had failed to prove the assaults were against the children’s wishes since they had either not resisted (the three-year-old) or did not resist enough (the six-year-old). Shao led the Supreme Court panel that sent the case against the three-year-old’s attacker back to the Taiwan High Court.
So great was the outrage over those rulings that on Sept. 7 last year, the Supreme Court announced that sexual assaults on children under the age of seven would henceforth carry a minimum prison sentence of seven years, whether the assault was “believed to have been made against the victim’s will or not.”
In September Ma heard the protests against “dinosaur judges” and the pleas for judicial reform, but by last month he, along with Siew’s task force, had forgotten the names of the judges in the cases that sparked the protests? That strains credulity.
Lo said on Thursday that the Presidential Office would “pay more attention next time the president makes a nomination.” Great, but there is still the current nomination mess to sort out. Judges who have a record of rulings based solely on hewing to the letter of the law instead of interpreting the law would seem to be ill-suited to a job that requires them to interpret the Constitution.
Ma said that he hoped the legislature would ratify his four nominees before its summer recess so the new grand justices could be sworn in on Oct.1, as required by law. The lawmakers should certainly take their time and give the nominees a thorough vetting, since neither the task force nor the Presidential Office appears to have done so.
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