Taipei District Court judges, delivering their verdict on the "soft coup" slander case brought against President Chen Shui-bian (
Certainly, the presidency represents a system, an institution, but the position of president is nevertheless occupied by an individual. The institution of the presidency doesn't actually do anything per se, it is the individual who occupies the post who gets things done. In the same vein, it is true that the institution of the presidency cannot say anything, it is only the individual who can speak. Therefore, the question lies in whether or not the president as an individual enjoys freedom of speech, not whether freedom of speech belongs to the presidency as an institution. If we accept this line of reasoning, is it possible to also accept the judge's argument of identifying the presidency with the president?
There is nothing actually wrong with seeing the presidency as an institution; this approach was originally used by Japanese and German academics to facilitate research. It is faintly ridiculous, however, to approach the matter at hand purely in the abstract.
Political debate is not about the cold analysis of how systems operate, it is about the real life interactions and struggles of political players. In the same way, a verdict is reached through the judge making a decision as an individual, and not through a certain institution just collecting evidence and reaching a conclusion based on it.
A story from the UK serves as a vivid demonstration of this. A lawyer jumped aboard an already moving train to ask a judge to consider a certain verdict: the judge agreed with his argument and approved a verdict in accordance with it. There is also the case of US Supreme Court judge William Orville Douglas, whose walks in the mountains were often interrupted by lawyers seeking to consult him about appeals. Where was the court in these cases? Where were the institutions? The answer is that the institution of the court is not the court building itself, it is the judges who pronounce their verdicts. Again, it is not the presidency that speaks, it is the president.
Naturally, the president should not enjoy complete immunity in what he says. Whether or not the "soft coup" claims actually constitute the type of issue that can be publicly debated and are appropriate to debate, is subject to discussion.
However, to say that the president does not have the right to criticize individuals in the public sphere or to comment about public issues not only goes against the spirit behind the well-known US Supreme Court rulings -- in the New York Times vs Sullivan and Hustler Magazine vs Falwell cases -- which required proof of "actual malice," it also goes against Interpretation No. 509 by our own Council of Grand Justices, which says the burden of proof is not on the defendant.
The crux of the matter lies in whether we actually want to broaden political debate. It seems to me that politicians are a hardy breed quite able to protect themselves. Any restrictions placed on opinions expressed about public issues serve only to limit the electorate's ability to come to their own conclusions. Inappropriate comments made by politicians should be sanctioned by the people, not the courts.
Thomas Weishing Huang is a visiting professor at the Law School of Shih Hsin University.
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL CHENG AND PAUL COOPER
The Cabinet on Nov. 6 approved a NT$10 billion (US$318.4 million) four-year plan to build tourism infrastructure in mountainous areas and the south. Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) on Tuesday announced that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications would offer weekday accommodation discounts, birthday specials and other domestic travel incentives beginning next March, aiming to encourage more travel outside the usual weekend and holiday peaks. The government is right to focus on domestic tourism. Although the data appear encouraging on the surface — as total domestic trips are up compared with their pre-COVID-19 pandemic numbers — a closer look tells a different
For more than seven decades, the Chinese Communist Party has claimed to govern Tibet with benevolence and progress. I have seen the truth behind the slogans. I have listened to the silences of monks forbidden to speak of the Dalai Lama, watched the erosion of our language in classrooms, and felt the quiet grief of a people whose prayers are monitored and whose culture is treated as a threat. That is why I will only accept complete independence for Tibet. The so-called “autonomous region” is autonomous in name only. Decisions about religion, education and cultural preservation are made in Beijing, not
Apart from the first arms sales approval for Taiwan since US President Donald Trump took office, last month also witnessed another milestone for Taiwan-US relations. Trump signed the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act into law on Tuesday. Its passing without objection in the US Senate underscores how bipartisan US support for Taiwan has evolved. The new law would further help normalize exchanges between Taiwanese and US government officials. We have already seen a flurry of visits to Washington earlier this summer, not only with Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), but also delegations led by National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu
I recently watched a panel discussion on Taiwan Talks in which the host rightly asked a critical question: Why is the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) spearheading a robust global movement to reject China’s ongoing distortion of UN Resolution 2758? While the discussion offered some context, a more penetrating analysis and urgent development was missed. The IPAC action is not merely a political gesture; it is an essential legal and diplomatic countermeasure to China’s escalating and fundamentally baseless campaign to manufacture a claim over Taiwan through the deliberate misinterpretation of a 1971 UN resolution. Since the inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) as
RSS