The bail for former senior Ting Hsin International Group (頂新國際集團) executive Wei Ying-chun (魏應充), a suspect in the tainted oil scandal, has been tripled from NT$100 million (US$3.2 million) to NT$300 million. This may be the highest bail ever demanded by the nation’s courts, but when considering the scale of the scandal, many people resent what they see as unfair treatment and think judges should not allow Wei to spend the Lunar New Year holidays at home just because he is wealthy.
Ting Hsin is now public enemy No. 1 and there is a lot of pressure on the judiciary to uphold strict measures, but it is following the law and human rights demands, and has to “educate” the media in the hope that the facts will be accurately reported. Prosecutors have filed an appeal, and whether Wei will be able to spend the New Year’s holiday at home, remains to be decided by the courts.
Detention is a means of ensuring the judicial process can proceed smoothly and prevent a defendant from fleeing, colluding with witnesses or destroying evidence. It is a restriction to someone’s personal freedom — and the severest sanction available until a verdict is issued. To guarantee the safety of a defendant and the evidence, while still upholding the principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, a defendant has the right to apply for guarantees such as bail, placing the defendant in the custody of another, or restricting them to their home.
Investigators are still looking to secure evidence in cases linked to Ting Hsin. Given this, and considering that the cases involve a large number of suspects and that the Wei family has access to tens of billions of New Taiwan dollars and private airplanes — which would allow them to leave the country at any time — detention becomes necessary.
The defendants in this case have been charged, which means prosecutors have already finished gathering evidence. It would therefore be difficult to justify detention on the grounds that it would prevent the destruction of evidence. If the reason was to prevent collusion with witnesses, or that witnesses could be threatened, it is not certain that this would occur. So if detention is lightly extended for that reason, that would affect the defendant’s right to a fair trial. The reason for detention, then, would be to prevent escape.
If the court is taking a cautious approach toward detention, there should be none during the trial, and bail should be used to prevent escape. However, money has a different effect on people depending on their economic situation, so the bail amount must be decided by judges based on experience. In the case of Wei, with his enormous wealth, even NT$300 million seems insufficient, which is why he has been restricted to his home and must report to the police daily. Despite such measures, however, people have been able to flee the country in the past.
Even if the judge requires that police constantly monitor Wei’s whereabouts, personnel restrictions and time constraints will offer loopholes, and even if Wei is given an electronic sensor, such sensors have been broken in the past.
It is precisely because the methods for preventing an escape are flawed, that in practice, detention — which should be the last option — is the best option. Even though the court has set a high bail amount, Wei’s wealth means that it will still be difficult to avoid public accusations that wealthy people are allowed to buy their freedom, and this will have a negative impact on the court’s credibility.
The Wei case is posing a challenge to the judiciary when it comes to the question of how to strike a balance between human rights guarantees and controlling offenders, but while a difficult issue, it is something that the judiciary must address.
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