Print

Mail

wiki links

Justice ministry, US law schools sign training agreement

The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with the law schools of Stanford and Cornell universities in the US under which the ministry will send outstanding prosecutors as visiting scholars to receive training at the two institutes.

The cooperative agreements aim to cultivate prosecutors' legal knowledge and foreign language competence and offer them an opportunity to broaden their perspective in hopes that they will be able to better represent Taiwan in international conferences and engage in negotiations with foreign countries, sources from the ministry said.

With a view to raising the standard of prosecutorial services, the ministry has proactively sought to forge links with prestigious law schools in the US and Japan and selected outstanding prosecutors to visit the educational institutions to learn about criminal law theory and practice in different countries and the advantages and shortcomings of these systems, the sources said.

Since 2002, the ministry has also signed MOUs with Yale University and Harvard University in the US, as well as the University of Tokyo and Waseda University in Japan, they said.

Prosecutors who are selected under the plan are granted paid study leave, full tuition subsidies and round-trip air fare, the sources said, adding that they would be required to serve at the ministry for a specific period of time after returning to Taiwan.

Since 2003, a total of 16 prosecutors have returned to the country and worked at the ministry after completing their overseas studies, the sources said.

As the ministry is the nation's representative agency at meetings of the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering, the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, APEC and the WTO, there is an urgent need to train prosecutors to improve their foreign language proficiency and professional expertise if they are to be involved in negotiations with other countries, they said.

They said the ministry had sent prosecutors to attend international negotiations or training sessions in Belgium, Australia and Japan in the past few months and recently dispatched prosecutors to join a Taiwan-EU workshop on legal affairs in Belgium.
This story has been viewed 1252 times.