Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is being commended by awakened residents mostly for daring to challenge convention, daring to act and not being afraid of making mistakes.
Ko, a physician, thinks that the current death certification process takes too much time and that this counteracts the utility of organs donated after the heart stops beating.
Therefore, he selected patients who he judged to be lifeless — but who did not yet meet the legal definition of brain death — to subject to tests.
After their life-sustaining medical support was removed and the patients’ hearts stopped beating, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) was used immediately, while ECMO coronary circulation was blocked to see whether the organs to be donated could be preserved, and that the donor’s heartbeat did not restart in the presence of the prosecutor present to confirm the death before organs could be donated.
Ko’s pioneering initiative has indeed increased the usability of organs from donors without a heartbeat, but during the tests, removing life-sustaining medical support — which was akin to ending a person’s life — had not been legalized.
In addition to the standard for determining brain death pertaining to organ donations, Ko invented a nonstandard for organ donations from people without heartbeats.
Consequently, doubts were raised that he was acting in a legal gray zone and obscuring the line between proclaiming and causing death.
Ko relies on his sense of justice in challenging national laws and regulations that he considers unreasonable. Regardless of whether the state presses charges against him and whether his self-proclaimed justice is all-encompassing, he still carries a bit of the moral prestige that comes with civil disobedience.
However, once he became mayor of Taipei, it became necessary to apply a different standard to examine his legal challenges.
Ko proposed the use of Taipei’s surveillance cameras at notorious illegal parking spots to crack down on illegal parking and streamline the use of police officers.
Although he said that the proposal is still under discussion and not yet finalized, he said — based on his legal point of view — that policymakers must not be restricted by the law.
Ko also criticized opponents, saying that those who use complex regulations to hinder well-intentioned policies “have shit for brains.”
However, Ko seems to not fully understand that just because a nation under the rule of law enacts legislation to restrict the use of surveillance cameras for law enforcement, it does not mean that such laws are not made to serve the public.
Dictators faced with social progress often refer to the public interest as an excuse to gradually increase the power of the state, while passing laws that restrict using government power as the last defense for public liberty.
Perhaps only mature democratic societies that have learned their lessons from past experience of dictatorship and autocracy are able to insist on the real value of the rule of law.
Presently, the biggest challenge for increasingly aware residents is not to distinguish between Ko’s high intelligence and self-confidence and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) stubbornness, but rather to discern the opposing relationship between the power of Taipei’s residents and its mayor.
Chiou Wen-tsong is a member of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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