Introducing a jury system would be a vital judicial reform that will eliminate corrupt and incompetent judges, judicial reform advocates said yesterday.
Citing the example of Hu -Ch--ing-pin (胡景彬), a judge at the Taichung branch of the High Court who was recently accused of asking for a bribe of NT$4.5 million (US$150,000) from a defendant in a case he handled, the Jury Promotion Alliance (JPA) and the Taiwan Forever Association told a news conference that the current judge review mechanism has been malfunctioning and it was time to push for a thorough judicial reform.
“We believe that a jury system would better reflect the public’s expectations of the judiciary and social justice because jurors randomly selected from civilians would be free from bribery and political interference,” JPA convener and lawyer Cheng Wen-lung (鄭文龍) told a press conference.
Civilian participation in the judicial system would eliminate the so-called “dinosaur judges” who handed out unbelievable rulings that ran against all common sense, he said.
Taiwan has adopted the legal system of civilian law, originating in Europe, rather than the common law system of the US and the UK.
The current review mechanism and the Judges Act (法官法) were unable to fight corruption and eliminate bad judges, which was why civilian participation in the system would be “the only way,” said Wu Ching-chin (吳景欽), an associate professor of law at Aletheia University and a member of the TFA’s standing committee.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift