Prosecutor says law lets military step on freedoms

A law that allows the Ministry of National Defense to define what constitute military secrets violates the nation's Constitution, a prosecutor said at a meeting held at the Legislative Yuan yesterday.

At the public hearing held by PFP lawmakers, District Court Prosecutor Liu Cheng-wu (劉承武) said allowing the Ministry of National Defense to define military secrets gave the department too much power.

"It violates the principle of definition of the law," Liu said, adding that defining military secrets should be a matter of law and not administrative discretion.

"The department which possesses secrets should not have the power to decide the scope and classification of the secrets."

Last week Taipei district prosecutors searched the China Times Express newsroom and military prosecutors charged a Power News reporter with reporting on national defense secrets.

Presently, the Statute for Punishment of Betrayal of Military Secrets (妨害軍機治罪條例), authorizes the defense ministry to define a military secret with administrative decrees.

Deputy editor in chief of the Power News, Lan Shuan (蘭萱), said this was a fundamental flaw in the law as it enabled the military to suppress freedoms of the press.

She said the two articles for which the newspaper's reporter, Hung Che-cheng (洪哲政), was charged should not be defined as military secrets.

The articles, published on May 19 and July 29, were about the sighting of three Chinese military survey ships off Taiwan's eastern coast two days before the May 20 presidential inauguration.

Law professor Yu Ying-fu (尤英夫) also criticized the current law, saying the press should be included in any decision of what material could be defined as confidential.

In the China Times Express case, the newspaper published part of three documents containing secret interrogation records surrounding the embezzlement case of National Security Bureau chief cashier Liu Kuan-chun (劉冠軍).

Prosecutors say the search of the newsroom was made after they asked the reporters to hand over the unpublished part of the interrogation records and divulge their sources.

The reporters refused.

However, chief news editor of the United Daily News, Jeffrey Lo (羅國俊), did not accept this justification for the search.

"Access to information is an important part of freedom of the press. In practice, if reporters can not remain silent about their news sources, in many cases they won't have access to information."

He said the prosecutors may say they were acting in accordance with the law when they searched the press newsroom, but this just shows the country's laws were not adequate to protect press freedoms.

Lawmakers at the meeting said the Law of Opening Government Information (政府資訊公開法) and Law of National Secret Protection (國家機密保護法) should be passed soon to bolster essential freedoms of the press.

Drafts for these two laws were submitted to the legislature by the Executive Yuan in 1999.