The Taipei District Court late on Wednesday night rejected President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) request to overturn a decision by prosecutors not to indict Special Investigation Panel (SIP) prosecutor Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁).
In June, Ma filed a letter of committal asking the court to instruct prosecutors to indict Hou on forgery charges after they rejected an earlier request filed by Ma’s lawyer.
Hou was one of the prosecutors investigating Ma’s handling of his special allowance funds when he was Taipei mayor, minister of justice, vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council and other posts.
In the ruling, district court judges stated that the written record of the questioning of Wu Li-ju (吳麗洳), a Taipei City Government treasurer, was not inconsistent with the conclusions drawn from the questioning. Even if the record were over-simplified, there were audio and video recordings of the questioning, so it would have been viable for the court to examine the recordings to clarify the witness’ real intentions, the judges said.
The judges ruled that Hou often asked Wu subjective questions, which may have interfered with the court’s goal of discovering the truth through the witness’ statement. However, even if Hou’s questions were inappropriate, it would have been an administrative mistake, not forgery as Ma alleged. The ruling is final and Ma cannot appeal.
Last year, Ma requested that Hou be indicted for forgery, alleging that Hou had falsely documented his questioning of Wu regarding Ma’s use of his special mayoral allowance.
Ma had asked the court to remove three prosecutors from his cases, citing “bias.”
Chen Tsung-ming (陳聰明), state public prosecutor-general, rejected the request.
At a meeting last year with the Arbitration Association of the Republic of China, Ma made a reference to his legal woes by saying that more attention should be paid to keeping accurate documents of questioning sessions.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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