Nine months ago, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and her administration took office. During the election, Tsai was praised for her calls to reform the judicial, pension and party asset systems.
To this day, there has been either no progress or it is painfully slow. There are two reasons for this: The wrong people have been assigned to initiate the reforms, and the reforms are being carried out in the wrong order.
Reform is a matter of shaking up the personnel structure, as its success is intimately connected to who is in charge. Reform that is managed by conservative forces from an old system with old ideas is likely fail because of obstacles covertly placed by people opposed to reform.
Reform that is managed by more open-minded forces, but still from an old system, are likely to be half-baked because they are always concerned with this, that or the other.
Reform managed by a combination of external and internal forces will be smooth.
If it is impossible to find reform-minded people with backbone in the old system, it would be impossible to bring about reform unless the whole process is handled by external forces.
The Tsai administration looking to retired military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers as the main counterpart to pension reform, and allowing accomplices of the former party-state framework to manage judicial reform, is a waste of time and money. It will only wear down the patience and confidence of those who have high hopes for reforms.
While the government seems to have found the right person to manage party asset reform, the timing is poor. Until judicial reform is finalized, the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee’s research will not matter.
The same is likely to hold true when it comes to the pension reform commission.
Without legal backing, there is certain to be interference on technical grounds because of a lack of proper legal procedure, as well as administrative lawsuits and a constitutional interpretation by the Council of Grand Justices.
When the committee’s decision to freeze the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) ill-gotten assets reaches patriotic judges with KMT loyalties at the Administrative Supreme Court (最高行政法院), it is the settlement committee that will be frozen. If the committee is unhappy, it can appeal, but it will fail and will have no choice but to accept it.
The Tsai administration has opened too many battle fronts without first dealing with judicial reform.
In addition to judicial, pension and party asset reforms, there is the introduction of the five-day work week and the proposed marriage equality legislation. That might be why reform efforts seem to have lost steam.
Without judicial reform, party asset and pension reforms are likely to run into obstacles.
When Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said on Wednesday that “as long as pension reform succeeds, all other reforms are certain to succeed as well,” he likely underestimated the destructive powers of the “dinosaur judges.”
For judicial reform to succeed, the most important thing is to reform the judicial personnel system and remove the people that disgrace their profession.
Should a judge justify a not-guilty verdict in a case of alleged misuse of special expense funds by comparing it with the way public funds were used in the Song Dynasty? Should prosecutors be allowed to encourage witnesses to perjure themselves to simplify matters?
If this type of power abuse is not eliminated from the judicial system, then its reform is a ruse to deceive the public, and there is a good chance that party asset and pension reforms will be pushed through in a perfunctory manner.
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired National Hsinchu University of Education associate professor and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Perry Svensson
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS