Early this month, the Taipei City Government released a report on students’ occupation of the Ministry of Education on July 23. However, the three journalists arrested that day later held a news conference in front of Taipei City Hall to say that many key points in the report were vague and no clear disciplinary action was taken.
It remains unclear why the journalists were arrested. They had cooperated with the police by showing their press cards, as well as taking photographs and sending their reports from within the area designated by the police.
The police said they were arrested because the ministry insisted on taking them to court for trespassing.
Who decided to take them to court and when did they make the decision? The ministry is headed by Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華). If the decision was not made by Wu, was it made by the security guards at the scene or by ministry officials, or was it made during a meeting on July 11, before the protest, as one of the conclusions of that meeting indicates?
The decision was illegal no matter how it was made and it was a grave violation of freedom of the press.
The question is whether the police should take responsibility for first wrongly arresting the reporters and then passing the buck, or whether the ministry should take responsibility for pressuring the police to arrest them in the first place.
The police also proposed to implement a standard operating procedure for internal division of labor, but did not address the core issue — how the police should judge what is illegal and what is not at the scene of a protest.
The constitutionally protected right to freedom of the press was reiterated by the Council of Grand Justices’ Constitutional Interpretation No. 689.
When the police decided whether the reporters’ actions were illegal, they must have considered that the reporters entered the ministry in order to perform their legitimate duty of reporting the news, and then — after weighing the public interest of reporting against the possible negative consequences of entering the ministry — decided that the public interest outweighed the illegal aspect. This is what it means to make a full evaluation of whether the actions were illegal.
Making such judgement calls is the basic duty of the police as law enforcers and it is not something that can be avoided simply because someone threatens to take legal action. For example, people may report accidents or disputes to the police, but that does not mean that the police can arrest the other party because the person filing the report wants them to. The police have to make an independent judgement of the situation at the scene in accordance with the law. This should not change just because the plaintiff is a government agency.
Other controversial issues stemming from the arrest of the reporters included the use of plastic handcuffs, restricting their communications and preventing them from seeing their lawyers.
All that is needed to reveal the truth is to see the video recordings and the police records. Yet the Taipei City Government held three meetings before releasing its ambiguous report, while Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said that he would not punish any police officers if the protesters and journalists are not sued, as a way to resolve the problem “smoothly.”
That is pure hypocrisy, because it does not reveal the truth, does not assign responsibility and it will not lead to systemic reform. The only smooth thing about it is the way it abuses freedom of the press while allowing the problem to remain.
Hsu Jen-shuo is a legal specialist at the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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