The Judicial Yuan nominations drew fire from civic activists yesterday, who said that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) choices for president and vice president were unqualified to advance judicial reforms.
Tsai earlier this week nominated Public Functionary Disciplinary Sanction Commission Chief Commissioner Hsieh Wen-ting (謝文定) to serve as Judicial Yuan president, while picking Judicial Yuan Secretary-General Lin Chin-fang (林錦芳) to succeed Su Yeong-chin (蘇永欽) as vice president.
“We hope that [Hsieh and Lin] politely decline the nominations,” Soochow University associate law professor Hu Po-yen (胡博硯) said at a Taiwan Association of University Professors news conference, adding that both nominees lack academic credentials, as well as creativity and any vision of reform.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
“I was stunned by the nominations,” Taiwan Forever Association secretary-general Kao Yung-cheng (高涌誠) said.
Kao served as a legal consultant to Tsai during the presidential campaign and said that he had expected Tsai to nominate candidates with outstanding legal credentials.
“The discrepancy is huge,” he said, questioning their academic credentials and familiarity with reform proposals.
Hsieh and Lin have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum since their nominations after Su accused Tsai of seeking to interfere with judicial independence with her choices, while activists from Taiwan Democracy Watch and the Awakening Foundation said the nominees lacked gender awareness and reform credentials.
Tsai in her inauguration speech promised to call a national congress on judicial reform to increase civic participation and said during her election campaign that because the judicial system had proven incapable of reforming itself, her presidency would guide the reforms using its constitutional prerogative to coordinate reform efforts across different government branches.
Fu Jen Catholic University law professor Wu Hao-jen (吳豪人) disagreed with the other participants at the news conference, defending Tsai’s choice of experienced government officials — instead of leading legal academics — as “stabilizing” the Judicial Yuan prior to the reform efforts.
“What is wrong with stabilizing the system first?” Wu asked. “Who cares if you have written four books — what is the guarantee that you will be able to deliver?”
“All this means is that Tsai will bear full responsibility for the success or failure of any reform efforts because she has chosen the people who will follow her orders,” 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:
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