On Monday last week, the Kaohsiung District Court gave four Advanced Semiconductor Engineering employees suspended sentences ranging from 16 to 22 months for dumping toxic nickel waste into the Houjin River (後勁溪). The court also fined the company NT$3 million (US$98,700). Senior company executives were not charged over the incident.
There are two factors to Advanced Semiconductor Engineering receiving such a light penalty.
The first has to do with the evidence the Kaohsiung City Government and the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office presented to the court and the adjudication of the judges.
The second is that the Water Pollution Control Act (水污染防治法) and the Waste Disposal Act (廢棄物清理法) are both limited in ways that stop them from achieving social equity and justice and effectively preventing abuses. These laws definitely need to be amended.
The way the case was dealt with by the judiciary raises an important question.
Given that Advanced Semiconductor Engineering is a repeat offender and has broken the law 25 times in three years, why did the authorities not trace the firm’s record of breaking the regulations and examine its operation logs so as to compile key evidence about its lawbreaking? If they had done this, the judgement might have met the requirements of social equity, and perhaps those who are really to blame would have been brought before the court.
The controversies over the laws involved and the penalties imposed aside, the really important issue is whether environmental conditions have been improved. What action needs to be taken for the environment to recover and to prevent similar tragedies from happening again?
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering is not the only source of pollution in the Houjin River, and without the help of research by academic institutions, it was hard for the court to judge whether the firm’s actions amounted to an offense against public safety.
Government departments failed to provide background data about the extent of the pollution of the Houjin River. This might be the reason no academic institution was willing to take on the court-appointed task of assigning responsibility for the pollution. Pollution of the Houjin River did not start a year or two ago, and nearly a year has passed since Advanced Semiconductor Engineering’s release of toxic waste.
Since the incident occurred, has the Kaohsiung City Government or its Environmental Protection Bureau and Department of Health compiled any data to establish a pollution fingerprint for the Houjin River, or conducted health surveys or risk assessments for farming and fishing businesses and residents of downstream areas?
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering chairman and chief executive Jason Chang (張虔生) said that the company would donate at least NT$3 billion over 30 years to worthy causes, but few further details have come out.
At present, the company has only announced plans to spend money on the installation of LED lights in schools, plant trees and issue green bonds. These piecemeal gestures do nothing to help the Houjin River to recover from the pollution caused by the firm. In fact, they look more like greenwashing.
If Chang is sincere, why does he not pay the NT$3 billion into a charitable trust and allow an impartial third party or academic institution assess the extent of pollution in the Houjin River and the risks it presents, so as to work out how much responsibility Advanced Semiconductor Engineering and other firms have for the pollution?
Such a fund could be used to put resources into reviving the river, rather than making the public foot the environmental bill that should be paid by the factories responsible.
Following these incidents of pollution, what the public wants to know most is what impact Advanced Semiconductor Engineering has had on the environment and on the health of people living in the river basin. People want to know what strategies the government is adopting and what kind of monitoring mechanisms it is going to set up.
Kaohsiung’s Environmental Protection Bureau is now encouraging industrial zones and major polluting factories to install continuous automatic systems monitoring water quality. The data should be made available on the Internet in real time so that the public can observe what is happening to the environment. This could also function as an early-warning system, enabling the public, government and business to act in concert to protect the environment.
When the environment is damaged and people’s health is threatened, although the guilty parties must be made culpable, it is even more important that the nation learn lessons from such painful experiences. The inadequate framework of laws and regulations needs to be thoroughly reviewed and amended.
We must make up for deficiencies, carry out the necessary basic environmental research and provide more open and transparent information. It is important that everyone should be able to see what condition that the nation is in.
When the situation is clarified, the nation’s wounds can begin to heal.
Tsai Hui-sun is head of the energy policy division of Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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