It has been nearly two weeks since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) stunned the nation by nominating Shao Yen-ling (邵燕玲) to the Council of Grand Justices. Shao is the Supreme Court judge who caused outrage last year by ruling that a man found guilty of sexually molesting a three-year-old deserved a reduced sentence because the toddler did not resist his advances strongly enough. Her nomination to the prestigious body charged with constitutional interpretation can be added to the long list of blunders by the Ma administration that range from political miscalculation to outright lunacy.
Since then, things have gone from bad to worse. First, Ma apologized, saying he was unaware who Shao was and blaming the screening committee led by Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) for not telling him, and Judicial Yuan President Rai Hau-min (賴浩敏) for recommending her. At that point, Shao, who had already declined the nomination, issued a statement saying that she warned everyone involved — including Ma — that her candidacy would be contentious. Legislators then got involved, questioning Ma’s honesty and judgment, with the usual calls for everyone to resign. If that wasn’t enough, now it appears that other nominees have problems of eligibility related to citizenship.
It is hard to say what is more serious, that Ma lied about what he knew when nominating Shao for one of the most important posts in the nation’s judicial system or that he chose to ignore it. Both demonstrate an appalling lack of integrity.
Yet while everyone is distracted by Ma’s latest administrative sideshow, its most disturbing aspect has gone largely unnoticed: Namely that Shao’s nomination exposes the vacuity of the government’s pledge to reform the judicial system.
Indeed, Shao’s was one of several controversial rulings last year that prompted civic groups to demand such reform, which Ma promised to support. However, to date, this has amounted to little more than tabling a proposal for a so-called “judge’s law” to evaluate prosecutors and judges, and to fire them if they are found to be unqualified.
Such a law is at best a mixed bag and possibly quite dangerous. Not only will attempting to remove unfit members of the judiciary be messy and probably ineffective, but who decides that a judge or a prosecutor is unfit? In doing their jobs, judges are often required to make difficult, often unpopular decisions. The threat of removal will expose them to political coercion and the capriciousness of public opinion.
Restoring confidence in the judicial system will require larger institutional changes. The quality of the judiciary begins with education, and the current system of recruiting future justices directly out of high school and vetting them through a series of college examinations must stop. A law school graduate in this nation can become a judge at the age of 24, with little life experience and a vocational education largely unconcerned with developing the kind of critical and creative abilities needed to adjudicate an increasingly complex legal world. Laws are not simply invoked, they are applied, and the process of doing so demands greater sensitivity to the social and cultural circumstances of a case than many current graduates of the system demonstrate.
Nor is education the only problem. A degree from the finest university proves only that one has been a successful student. Experience hones emerging skills, and working in various legal settings and capacities provides grounds for promotion to higher levels of professional responsibility. In many countries, judges work for decades as attorneys and prosecutors before being elected to the bench. Confidence is earned in the field, not in an examination booklet.
Institutions are characterized by a reluctance to change. Judicial reform will require time and political capital. The lip service of an incompetent administration will hardly do.
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