Minister of Justice Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) yesterday defended the police for stopping and questioning people in certain locations if they had reasonable suspicions to do so.
His comments came amid a debate about personal liberties and police duties after Council of Hakka Affairs Minister Lee Yung-te (李永得) complained on Sunday about being stopped and questioned while running an errand in Taipei.
Chiu’s remarks were seen by some as a rebuke of Lee.
Photo: CNA
Lee accused a group of police officers of stopping him at random near a convenience store at the Taipei Bus Station, without having a clear reason for doing so, and demanding that he show his national identity card.
Police Captain Chen Feng-sheng (陳豐盛), who is with the Mobile Division, on Monday told a news conference that several of his officers were on patrol when they saw Lee exiting the store wearing flip-flops and they decided to approach him and ask for his identification because he kept looking at them, which made them suspicious.
“The way I see it, there was no major problem with the police action from a legal perspective, and no major problem with the way it was conducted, but only in the officers’ technique. This incident is worth putting into the police training manual to educate officers,” Chiu said during a Ministry of Justice news conference on judicial reform measures.
“It is true that police cannot stop people for random checks in any public place. It should be in places designated by heads of police units, and most are in crime-prone locations, or places with high potential for criminal activities. To combat crime, police can designate those locations as places to stop people for checks, and as such, the Taipei Bus Station area was a reasonable location for the police to carry out these duties,” the minister said.
The police should only stop people in public places who “are reasonably suspected of having committed a crime or having the likelihood of committing a crime,” as described under the Police Power Exercise Act (警察職權行使法), although could vary considerably due to each officer’s experience and personal understanding, Chiu said.
The minister went on to outline a series of proposed reforms of the prosecutorial system, most of which would require legal amendments to be passed by the Legislative Yuan.
Among the main proposals are a process that would allow prosecutors to vote by ballot for the head prosecutor at the district office and high prosecutor office levels, as they are the ones who lead teams in public prosecution cases.
A maximum of two instances for a case review was proposed to minimize waste of judicial resources, while more transparency in prosecutions and a system of checks and balances on chief prosecutors’ powers were proposed, as in the past there have been questions of political interference, personal bias and outside influence marring some cases, the minister 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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