President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday touted a plan to allow observers to attend court trials, assuring reform advocacy groups that the plan is a necessary step toward increasing public trust in the judiciary.
“The trial observation system is the first step toward allowing the public to participate in trials,” Ma said during a round-table discussion with advocates of reform of the justice system.
The proposed system, the fruit of efforts to involve the public in trials since 1987, would allow people to attend trials and express their opinions, Ma said.
The judge would then respond to the non-binding opinions and provide reasons to support his or her decision, he said.
A survey conducted last year revealed that 81 percent of respondents believed such a system would help enhance trust in the judiciary, he said.
However, Ma conceded that the trial observation system is only a “ground-laying” measure compared with Japan’s lay judge system and South Korea’s jury trial system similar to the one used in the US.
Commenting on those two systems, Ma said that the launch of Japan’s lay judge system in 2009 was marred by limited interest, with only 30 percent of the public wanting to join.
However, once people began taking part regularly, 96.7 percent of people wanted to take part in the court system, Ma said.
He added that a 2003 survey indicated that as many as 83.7 percent of South Koreans had doubts about the fairness of their judiciary.
In contrast, 69 percent of people described rulings as “trustworthy” after jury trials were introduced in 2008, he said.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching