A survey released by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday found that 46 percent of respondents believed that the judiciary wasn’t handling money laundering allegations against former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) with impartiality.
The survey, conducted by telephone with 896 respondents of voting age on Wednesday and Thursday, found that 38.7 percent said the case was being handled fairly.
The margin of error for these survey results, to a 95 percent confidence level, is plus or minus 3.3 percent, the DPP said in its statement.
“The DPP is very supportive of the judiciary’s probe into the case according to the provisions of the laws but over the past two weeks, the judiciary has different versions of the sources of the funds ... Even now, it has no proof to show that the funds were income Chen obtained through corruption,” DPP Department of Culture and Information Director Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) told a press conference yesterday.
“The poll result showed that the public does not trust the judiciary’s handling of the case of former president Chen,” he said.
Cheng called for the judiciary to adopt a more conscientious approach in dealing with the case to prove that the nation’s judicial system is independent of politics and is able to protect the human rights of the people involved.
Cheng said the survey was also conducted to cross reference answers with party inclination to determine which categories of respondents were more likely to distrust the judiciary in handling this case.
It showed that 69 percent of supporters in favor of the DPP were suspicious of the impartiality of the judiciary, while 37.9 percent of pan-blue supporters and 40.9 percent of the respondents without party affiliation held the same opinion.
The results of the survey suggested there is a lack of public trust in the judiciary, Cheng said.
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