Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday fought back after reports that Control Yuan member Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) plans to question Taipei District Court Judge Tang Yue (唐玥) over the High Court’s decision to acquit Ma in July.
While stumping for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidates in the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections in Hsinchu County yesterday, Ma berated Chen for the planned questioning of Tang.
Chen would be seriously interfering with the justice system, Ma said.
Photo: Liao Hsueh-ju, Taipei Times
Ma was acquitted of charges that he leaked classified information and breached telecommunications security law when dealing with wiretaps of two top lawmakers in 2013.
Chen has accused judges involved in the case of abusing the principle of judicial discretion and of passing judgement based on their political stance and personal bias.
Then-prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘), who passed the information on to Ma, was found guilty, but did not have to serve a 15-month sentence and paid a fine instead, Chen said on Tuesday.
Chen has made statements about alleged misconduct, failures and corruption in the justice system, and the perception that judges favor wealthy people who hold political power.
“We can see from many cases … that Taiwan’s judiciary is not the last line of defense when it comes to upholding justice for the people. It is the preserve of conservative forces, the final stronghold of the one party-state’s political ideology,” Chen said, referring to the KMT.
Chen said that if there is no power authorized to monitor the justice system, then “judicial independence” is in reality “judicial dictatorship.”
The Judges’ Association of the Republic of China, as well as other organizations for judges and judiciary officials, have launched a petition protesting Chen’s remarks and released a statement saying that they would protect judicial independence from tampering by Chen and other Control Yuan members.
Chen served as a top aide to former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), and was deputy Taipei mayor and Democratic Progressive Party secretary-general.
He has been highly critical of the justice system, as it found Chen Shui-bian guilty of corruption, while Ma has been consistently cleared of corruption charges.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS