President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday touted his administration’s efforts to protect the human rights of criminal suspects.
Ma said that since he took office, he has signed two UN conventions and the legislature passed the Speedy Criminal Trials Act (刑事妥速審判法) last month. Although the new piece of legislation is still controversial, it marked a milestone in the country’s judicial history, he said.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.
The law aims to expedite the prosecution of criminal cases to prevent trials and appeals from dragging on for more than a decade, as has sometimes been the case.
The Ministry of Justice is also examining the Detention Act (羈押法) to see whether it is possible to further protect the human rights of detainees, he said, and the Executive Yuan yesterday also approved a draft law that would protect the rights of judges as well as evaluate their performance.
Ma made the remarks when meeting Jerome Cohen, co-director of the US-Asia Law Institute at New York University’s School of Law, at the Presidential Office yesterday.
Cohen, who taught Ma law at Harvard University, said he first visited Taiwan in 1961 and has seen dramatic changes over the past 50 years.
“The Taiwanese government and Taiwanese people have made tremendous progress and contribution to the improvement of human rights,” he said in Mandarin Chinese. “When I visit the mainland next time, I will tell them the newest development.”
Cohen said the US would benefit from learning Taiwan’s judicial system and rule of law and should understand that Taiwan has improved greatly in terms of human rights and democracy since 1987.
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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