The Ministry of Justice is carrying out a major personnel reshuffle that will see new heads at top posts, most notably with Deputy Minister of Justice Hsing Tai-chao (邢泰釗) being named to replace Tsai Pi-yu (蔡碧玉) as head of the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office.
Minister of Justice Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) announced the promotions and transfers on Tuesday, but the changes will officially be made at a ceremony on July 18.
Tsai Pi-yu is being transferred to the Judges Academy, where she will take over the post of principal from Tsai Ching-hsiang (蔡清祥), who has been named lead prosecutor at the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office.
However, some ministry officials have said that Tsai Ching-hsiang is likely to be appointed to lead the ministry’s Investigation Bureau in the near future.
New appointments to head the prosecutors’ offices in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林), New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli, Taichung, Changhua, Chiayi, Pingtung, Yilan, Hualien, Taitung, Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang County were also announced.
The reshuffle was welcomed by many lawyers and others in the judicial field, who said it showed that Chiu was taking full command of the judiciary and the changes would serve as a warning for all the ministry’s personnel to shape up.
Huang Yueh-hung (黃越宏), publisher of the Journal on the Rule of Law (法治時報) — a biweekly publication focused on legal and judicial issues — said the changes clearly showed the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration wants to reform the nation’s judiciary and judicial system.
The reshuffle could also mean that several cases involving former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九), alleging corruption and misuse of government funds, could be re-opened, observers said.
“Tsai Pi-yu is known in some circles as a Ma loyalist, since Ma appointed her to lead the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office,” Huang said yesterday in a television interview.
“To show her gratitude for her promotion to the post, she shelved a number of corruption cases against Ma, using legal maneuvers to block them from going forward, as well as dismissing other cases against Ma in recent years,” Huang said.
By choosing Hsing to head up the Taipei office, it is expected that work on Ma’s corruption cases will be kick-started within a few weeks, Huang said.
There are indications that work is under way to prepare for judicial proceedings against Ma, Huang added.
“There has been a clamor to remove Tsai Pi-yu for some time because she has a reputation for biased and selective prosecution, using judicial powers to probe allegations of corruption and illegal conduct against DPP-related people, but making little effort to investigate and bring charges in the many cases of alleged corruption and misdeeds by Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] officials,” Huang 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:
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