Led by former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強), a group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members yesterday delivered 3,000 signatures to the Central Election Commission for a proposed referendum on interference in the nation’s judicial system by politicians and the government.
Lo and former Straits Exchange Foundation secretary-general C.V. Chen (陳長文), who co-leads the Anti-Obstruction of Justice Referendum Alliance, said that one of the signatories was former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九).
Accusing Control Yuan member Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) of making public threats against members of the judiciary, Lo said: “The reason people like him can brazenly infringe on the judiciary with their power is because there are no laws to punish them.”
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Since his appointment in January, Chen Shih-meng, a vocal critic of the nation’s judicial system, has launched multiple probes into past court cases involving Ma and former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), alleging that court officials’ pro-KMT bias had violated judicial neutrality.
On Friday last week, he opened a new inquiry into whether Ma, as president in 2010, had improperly influenced the Ministry of Justice’s decision to discipline Hou Kuan-jen (侯寬仁), a prosecutor who in 2007 unsuccessfully prosecuted Ma for misappropriating his special allowance during his eight-year tenure as Taipei mayor.
Ma’s office spokeswoman Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) yesterday said that Ma was gladdened by the progress of the referendum petition and believes it would succeed.
However, Lo said the referendum is non-partisan, adding that he welcomes people of all political persuasions concerned with judicial independence to join the movement.
The influence of power and wealth could compromise judicial neutrality, but while the nation’s laws insulate the judiciary from bribery, major loopholes exist with regard to improper political influence, Lo said.
The proposed referendum is a vote on whether a legal penalty could be imposed on presidents, lawmakers, Control Yuan members or other high-ranking officials for directly or indirectly pressuring, lobbying or improperly influencing members of the judiciary toward obtaining a favorable court ruling for themselves or others, he said.
After the commission verifies the first-phase signatures that the alliance submitted, it would work on pushing the proposal through the next legal hurdle of gathering 280,000 signatures, he said.
Under the Referendum Act (公民投票法), the threshold for the initiation of national and regional referendums is 0.0001 percent of the electorate in the most recent presidential election, or about 1,800.
The number of signatures required for a proposed referendum to pass its second stage is 1.5 percent, or about 280,000 signatures.
A referendum is passed when a plurality of voters, comprising more than a quarter of all eligible voters of the jurisdiction, have voted yes on its proposals.
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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