High court judges score low in poll

Criminal judges of the Taiwan High Court again scored badly in this year's judicial evaluation by the Taipei Bar Association, following poor performances in the three previous years since the evaluations began.

The Taipei Bar Association (台北律師公會) and the Judicial Reform Foundation (民間司改會) released the results of the annual evaluation of judges yesterday, and renewed a call for an overhaul to fix the personnel problems in the system.

In the judicial evaluation for this year, the fourth of its kind, criminal judges from the Taiwan High Court were evaluated by the more than 500 lawyer respondents as less competent than their counterparts at the three district courts which are subordinate to them.

In the evaluation of quality of judgements and judicial temperament, the 98 listed high court criminal judges received an average score of 76.55 out of a possible 100, while their counterparts in Panchiao District Court got 80.35 and the Taipei District Court 79.58. Moreover, the respondents, who made the evaluations according to their experiences working with the judges in trials, seemed to trust the young judges at the district courts more than the senior judges at the high court.

The Panchiao and Taipei district court judges were evaluated as "trustworthy" by more than 70 percent of lawyer respondents, while the high court judges were trusted by 55 percent.

The Taipei Bar and the Judicial Reform Foundation started the evaluations four years ago and have incurred the wrath of a number of judges, who took their poor evaluations as personal insults.

Two high court judges who received failing grades in the 1998 evaluation filed a libel suit against two of the foundation's executives in February last year.

The suit is still continuing, but the two organizations insisted on carrying on with the evaluations in an attempt to press the judiciary into improving the quality of judges. "Many have asked me whether they could get an impartial trial. I always say it's really hard to say because it very much depends on which judge handles the case," said Joseph Lin (林永頌), an executive official from the foundation and one of the defendants in the libel suit.