Time waits for nobody and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has only 18 months of her final term in office remaining.
Will the drubbing in the local elections on Nov. 26 leave Tsai a lame duck for the rest of her presidency? Will the opposition parties use their newfound influence to impede the governing party’s policy agenda? Will the tunes sung by the central and local governments become louder and more dissonant?
The nation will soon find out.
Time is not on Tsai’s side. She is not going to be able to embark upon any major new policies, and it is about time to start thinking about writing a performance review for her time in the Presidential Office.
Her much-touted judicial reform — the reason that voters gave the Democratic Progressive Party a majority and the presidency, and which she proclaimed with such vigor and to much applause in her inaugural address in 2016 — will be a major factor in this review.
The electorate, if not profoundly unimpressed, is at least frustrated with her performance in this regard.
First, did the voters ask for her half-baked “citizen judge” system — which is to be implemented on Jan. 1 and will only involve major criminal cases — or would they have preferred a jury system to hear civil and criminal cases, as has been long practiced in the US and the UK?
Will the design of the system Tsai promoted, in which six lay judges will confer with three professional judges to reach a verdict, prevent professional judges from controlling the outcomes?
Second, did they want a system in which judges and prosecutors have lifetime appointments?
If there is one thing that is certain in politics, it is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The principle can equally be applied to judges and prosecutors given lifetime appointments, especially for those who came up through the old party-state system.
In the US, the majority of state court judges are appointed through direct elections, while 95 percent of state prosecutors are elected to fixed terms in the county or district they serve.
It is clear which system — the fixed terms in the US or the lifetime appointments in Taiwan — most effectively mitigates the corrupting influence of power.
The coddled, dinosaur judges who evaluate the evidence as they please and have been a thorn in Taiwan’s side for so long, and the prosecutors who have double standards in how they decide whether to act on investigations and coerce false testimony, would be threatened with dismissal through meaningful judicial reform.
Tsai’s revision is reform in appearance only. It represents business as usual. Ill-performing judges and prosecutors can continue doing as they have, and might even get promoted under a new government.
It is unlikely that voters will be giving Tsai a high grade for this reform.
What voters wanted was a thorough renovation of the judicial system, not old wine in new wineskins.
Taiwan’s judicial reform has taken almost as many years as World War II, and what has Tsai to show for it?
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired National Hsinchu University of Education associate professor.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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