France and Taiwan formally agreed to cooperate on judicial training on Wednesday after judicial educational institutes from the two countries signed a cooperation protocol.
Jean-Francois Thony, director of the National School for the Judiciary (ENM) in Bordeaux, France, and Lin Huei-huang (林輝煌), director of the Ministry of Justice’s Judges and Prosecutors Training Institute (JPTI), signed the protocol during a ceremony at the ENM’s Paris campus.
The agreement mainly involves sponsoring seminars and exchange visits by faculty and students.
SIMILARITIES
In his speech at the ceremony, Lin said similarities in the nature of the two sides and their operations led the two institutes to decide to cooperate.
He said authorities from the two schools share identical perspectives on judicial training, believing that the curriculum should be diverse, covering not only technical issues, but also the humanities.
Lin said the JPTI had maintained an unofficial cooperative memorandum of understanding with the ENM over the past 10 years and the heads of the two institutes have always believed that wider and deeper cooperation was imperative.
ACHIEVEMENT
He said the signing of the protocol with ENM, founded in 1958, was one of the greatest achievements of his 12-year tenure as JPTI director.
Thony said institutionalizing judicial training exchanges with Taiwan was of great significance for his institute and that he looked forward to seeing the two sides strengthen cooperation.
Representative to France Michel Lu (呂慶龍), who witnessed the signing, said the cooperation program was encouraging and inspiring.
Other countries, including Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Japan and Russia, also maintained unofficial pacts with Taiwan on judicial training and education, Lin said.
PROBLEMS
Taiwan’s judiciary has been accused of lacking independence and experience, delivering odd judgments on issues such as child sexual abuse.
Some judges have been nicknamed “judicial dinosaurs” for their outdated views and judgments.
Cooperation on judicial training with other countries is expected to help address some of these matters.
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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