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US judge closes Wang court case

A curtain of secrecy descended on the case of fugitive Rebar Group chairman Wang You-theng (王又曾) in Los Angeles on Tuesday when a US federal immigration judge ordered his deportation hearing closed and forbade anybody involved in the case from disclosing any related information.

Within minutes of the beginning of Wang's first appearance in court since he was interdicted on his entry into Los Angeles airport on Feb. 2, Judge Rose Peters issued a "do not disclose order" at the request of Wang's lawyer, Franklin Nelson.

As a result, neither US government spokesmen nor lawyers taking part in the case can say anything publicly or privately about the case as long as the no-disclosure order is retained.

Comprehensive

The order would extend, for instance, to disclosure of the date of Wang's next appearance in the court, located within an immigration detention center in San Pedro Island south of Los Angeles. It is believed that the next hearing will take place on March 6 or March 7.

Tuesday's hearing, called a "calendar hearing," basically dealt with procedural matters and was scheduled to last only five to 10 minutes.

The prosecution and defense will not begin to argue the merits of the case until the "individual hearing" in March.

Wang's wife, Wang Chin She-ying (王金世英), a US citizen traveling on a US passport, did not attend Tuesday's hearing, a spokesperson for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office of the Department of Homeland Security, Virginia Kice, told reporters.

Four people

Shawn Chou, a lawyer working with the Taiwan press corps, told the Taipei Times that Kice had said only four people were in attendance: Peters, Nelson, Wang attorney Tiffany Tai (戴雯) and Homeland Security prosecutor Scott Lauren, said

Calls by the Taipei Times to Wang's lawyers were not returned.

Officials from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in Washington could offer no information on the case. A late cable from the Taiwan office in Los Angeles to Washington offered scant information, senior TECRO officials said.

They did say that no lawyers representing Taiwan were present at the hearing, despite speculation by reporters at the scene that an Asian woman at the detention center at the time of the hearing might have been a Taiwanese lawyer surnamed Lin, Chou said.

It was not clear why the judge ordered the hearing closed.

Kice told reporters that hearings could be ordered closed if they dealt with asylum requests, sensitive information the parties did not want disclosed, or matters of national security. It was hard to see which reason could be used in Wang's case.

Asylum usually pertains to an oppressive or authoritarian regime from which a detainee seeks to escape persecution or death while the Wang case appears to raise no national security issues.

However, Chou said that his "guess" was that "Mr Wang filed some sort of protective relief, or asylum motion," adding that this was "puzzling to outsiders."

The closing of the hearing was a huge disappointment to Taiwan-ese reporters. Over the Presi-dent's Day holiday weekend, Kice and Lynn Tso (左敏琳), a reporter for TVBS, had worked out a pool system in which six media representatives would attend the hearing and report back to journalists who could not gain entry.

But when the reporters appeared at 7:40am, 20 minutes before the 8am start time, Kice told them that Nelson had called her at 9pm the night before asking for the hearing be closed to the press.

Kice said she believed that such a decision should be made by a judge.

Kice went into the court, but returned a few minutes after the hearing began to tell the reporters that they would be barred from the hearing.

She said that the prosecution did not raise an objection to Nelson's "non-disclosure" motion.
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