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
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS