Wed, Feb 16, 2000 page8

• Editorial: Ng's case entertaining

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  Peter Ng (黃?撊?/CHINESE>), would-be assassin turned human rights campaigner, was sentenced yesterday to five months in prison. The result was expected, so there's not much room for argument. But there are many entertaining elements to the case.

  First, lest anyone be confused, he is not being prosecuted for having taken two shots at Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) in 1970. Rather, it is because, when he returned to Taiwan in 1996, he failed to apply for a visa. Compared to the gravity of the one action, the other seems laughable.

  Nonetheless, it is a basic human rights violation to prevent a person from returning to his or her home country (cf. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, paragraph 2). Moreover, this prosecution reflects a peculiarity of Taiwan's history.

  The martial law regime was, after a while, clever enough to allow many dissidents to go overseas, rather than turn them into martyrs. And it put a clause in the National Security Law specifically to keep them out -- the requirement for Taiwan nationals to obtain re-entry permits.

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a veritable tsunami of exiled dissidents tried to "jump over the wall to return home" (翻?eth>|^家), only to encounter a battery of harassment. Frequently, they were simply not allowed to go through immigration and were forced to fly back whence they came. The most notorious of these incidents involved Hsu Hsin-liang (3信良, who nonetheless went on to become DPP chairman and is now an independent presidential candidate), who was turned back at CKS airport, not once, but twice. The first time, there was a near riot among his supporters and an ensuing press blackout. On his second attempt, he was sent, without even disembarking, on the same plane back to Manila, where, to add insult to injury, he was arrested for having used a false Philippine passport.

  Those who, by whatever means, managed to make it into the country were frequently arrested for violating the National Security Law. Besides Hsu (who finally succeeded the third time by sneaking in on a fishing boat), others who were sentenced for this "crime" included two future legislators and Ng's co-conspirator, T.T. Deh (鄭|菾]).

  Ng's case is thus a vestige of that era, as Taiwan's democracy was just beginning. The fact that the case was brought at all is a depressing reminder of the distance that our legal system has to go before it can adequately meet the needs of a democratic society. In addition to the defects of staffing and organization of the judicial system, there are a huge number of archaic laws and regulations still on the books, awaiting amendment, if not outright abolition. The courts aren't helping by invariably refusing to rule on the constitutionality of laws, or even their coherence (with the exception of the Council of Grand Justices, which is thus perpetually overloaded), but doggedly sticking to the last letter, as they did with Ng yesterday.

  Not that Ng seems perturbed. Indeed, as a human rights campaigner, he has seemed to delight in using his case to expose the foibles of the system, turning the Code of Criminal Procedure back on the court. Most intriguingly, he has demanded -- and received -- an official statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as to the status of the two most important international human rights conventions in Taiwan's legal order, as he argued for what would probably have been the first time that substantive international human rights law was applicable in a Taiwanese court.

  The case looks set to be kept on appeal for some time to come. It should be a show worth watching.
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