A lack of funding and personnel have crippled the Ministry of Justice committee responsible for assessing public prosecutors, Judicial Reform Foundation members said yesterday, calling for the committee to be made independent.
“The mechanism for evaluating public prosecutors is out of order,” Judicial Reform Foundation executive director Kao Jung-chih (高榮志) said, adding that the Prosecutor Evaluation Committee had only investigated 30 cases in the past two years and only three were referred to the Control Yuan or Prosecutors’ Personnel Review Committee for disciplinary action.
Kao said that the Prosecutor Evaluation Committee’s status beneath the Ministry of Justice made it difficult for it to play the role of an independent watchdog, particularly given the part-time status of committee members.
Photo: Yang Kuo-wen, Taipei Times
“Prosecutors are part of the ministry to which the committee belongs to, which is a problem to begin with. The ministry has also refused to provide adequate money and personnel,” he said. “Although committee members are legal professionals, they do not have the ‘soldiers’ and ‘generals’ they need to investigate... Even their administrative assistant only works part-time.”
Activists cited two cases they said were examples of how the committee overlooked procedural misconduct.
In one case, a prosecutor allowed a key witness who was supposed to be held incommunicado to meet privately with his girlfriend, Kao said.
“The decision was extremely strange because when the man’s girlfriend came to the Prosecutora’ Office, no paper trail was left — she was like a ‘ghost,’” he said.
Activists said the committee declined to recommend discipline because the prosecutor had not intended to act illegally.
Foundation chairman Lin Yung-sung (林永頌) said that in another case, a public prosecutor had spoken out of line in court, ordering the handcuffing of a suspect, even though such orders are under the jurisdiction of the presiding judge.
The Prosecutor Evaluation Committee referred the case to the Prosecutors’ Personnel Review Committee, but the second committee did not issue any disciplinary action and gave no explanation, he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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