A national affairs conference on judicial reform is planned, but the sheer complexity of judicial reform means that it is unlikely to produce results, especially if certain core questions are not clarified.
First, how wide a scope is judicial reform actually supposed to cover? The narrow definition of “judicial organs” includes only the Judicial Yuan and the district, high and supreme courts that are subordinate to it, while the broad definition also includes prosecutors, police, the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau, prisons, detention centers and all other departments concerned with justice.
The issues concerning judicial organs in the broad sense cannot be resolved in a few short days. The conference should focus on the Judicial Yuan and its subordinate courts. The central idea of the separation of powers, namely the executive, legislative and judicial powers, is that they serve as checks and balances to one another.
The judiciary is the weakest of these three powers and this prevents it from performing its proper function. If the conference takes this as its central theme, all related departments, groups and individuals must do their utmost to work together to achieve their common goal of making judicial organs function better.
Second, should the judicial reform conference be defined as a consultative or policymaking body? How are its relations with the president of the Republic of China (ROC) and the president of the Judicial Yuan to be defined? Political accountability is one of the basic characteristics of democratic politics.
In accordance with this principle, Taiwanese authorize the president to exercise executive power and the president in turn appoints the president of the Judicial Yuan with the mandate of exercising the judicial administration aspect of judicial power, while the nation’s judges collectively hold the power of judicial judgement.
Since the presidents of the ROC and the Judicial Yuan are mandated to exercise their respective powers, they must bear full responsibility for doing so and cannot unload that responsibility onto anyone else. In view of this, the judicial reform conference should be defined as a consultative body and not a policymaking one.
Based on their respective powers and responsibilities, the presidents of the ROC and the Judicial Yuan should have absolute power regarding any resolutions adopted by the conference. Such an arrangement would comply with the basic concept of political accountability, as is the case with pension reforms.
If the conference is a consultative body, the question of whether it should arrive at its decisions by majority vote or consensus will not be a key concern.
Third, what criteria should be used to judge whether the reform is successful? The most essential requirement is that judicial bodies must be trusted by the public, so that degree of trust would be the best measure by which to judge its success.
However, the nature of the judiciary is such that, no matter how many people, time or resources are invested in it, there will never be a judiciary that enjoys the confidence of the entire public — it is only a matter of degrees.
So, following the conference, a specialized agency should be appointed to conduct public confidence surveys and take the results as the baseline, then continue to conduct such surveys once or twice a year to gauge confidence levels.
If confidence improves, it would be possible to say that judicial reform has been effective and successful.
Chen Chien-shun is a Hsinchu District Court judge.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS