New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) has proposed reinstating the long abolished Special Investigation Division (SID) to combat corruption if elected president. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) also held a news conference backing the policy.
However, the proposal goes against the trend of law enforcement in democratic countries around the world.
Taiwan is not the only nation to have had a special investigation division. Other democratic countries did as well. Over the years, they have found that judicial entities similar to Taiwan’s SID brought with them several risks and vulnerabilities, including abuse of power and political interference. As a result, most countries have abolished the system.
The US once had an independent counsel — an independent prosecutor distinct from the US Department of Justice’s attorney-general — who provided reports to the US Congress.
However, Americans opposed the system because its performance was underwhelming and it interfered in politics. Consequently, Congress abolished the independent counsel statute on June 30, 1999.
Japan also has a special investigation section, but it falls under the local prosecutors’ office, which reduces the possibility of an overconcentration of power in the hands of a few prosecutors, as was the case in Taiwan.
Another case in point is South Korea’s former Central Investigation Department, which ran for 32 years. It was abolished in April, 2013, due to concerns about its involvement in politics.
If Hou has had a good grasp of the law and judicial trends around the world, he would know that entities such as the former SID have been attacked over concerns such as an overconcentration of power and unfair investigations. From the US abolishing its independent counsel, Japan ensuring that its special investigation section falls under the local prosecutors’ office to South Korea abolishing the Central Investigation Department, it is apparent that the SID would be anachronistic if resurrected.
If the governing party were in favor of Hou’s out-of-date proposal, President Tsai ing-wen (蔡英文) would actually stand to benefit from it. If the investigative approaches of the SID — led by then-prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) during former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration — were still in place, Tsai could enjoy the “perks” that Ma did.
She could be acquitted by the High Court as Ma was, when he was accused of leaking classified information and breaching telecommunications security laws because of wiretaps conducted in 2013.
She could listen to the SID’s wiretapping of Hou, and summon the secretary-general to the president and the premier to the Presidential Office to coordinate as the investigation would involve the vertical separation of powers.
Next, the SID could hold a news conference to expose Hou’s wiretapped communications in the most sensational way.
In the “September strife” scandal in 2013, the SID was found to have placed the telephone numbers of unrelated cases under a single wiretapping warrant. If SID were to follow the same approach and wiretap all of Hou’s contacts and associates related to his hundred-room property using a single warrant, Tsai would also receive this “fruitful” surveillance.
The purpose of this hypothesis was to underscore Hou’s ignorance and how anachronistic his proposal is.
It is also laudable that Tsai’s administration chose the “self-defeating” option of abolishing the SID to prevent it from becoming a political weapon.
For Taiwan’s legal system to be in lockstep with the world, the SID should never be allowed to return.
Huang Di-ying is a lawyer and chairman of the Taiwan Forever Association.
Translated by Rita Wang
Elbridge Colby, America’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is the most influential voice on defense strategy in the Second Trump Administration. For insight into his thinking, one could do no better than read his thoughts on the defense of Taiwan which he gathered in a book he wrote in 2021. The Strategy of Denial, is his contemplation of China’s rising hegemony in Asia and on how to deter China from invading Taiwan. Allowing China to absorb Taiwan, he wrote, would open the entire Indo-Pacific region to Chinese preeminence and result in a power transition that would place America’s prosperity
When Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) first suggested a mass recall of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators, the Taipei Times called the idea “not only absurd, but also deeply undemocratic” (“Lai’s speech and legislative chaos,” Jan. 6, page 8). In a subsequent editorial (“Recall chaos plays into KMT hands,” Jan. 9, page 8), the paper wrote that his suggestion was not a solution, and that if it failed, it would exacerbate the enmity between the parties and lead to a cascade of revenge recalls. The danger came from having the DPP orchestrate a mass recall. As it transpired,
A few weeks ago in Kaohsiung, tech mogul turned political pundit Robert Tsao (曹興誠) joined Western Washington University professor Chen Shih-fen (陳時奮) for a public forum in support of Taiwan’s recall campaign. Kaohsiung, already the most Taiwanese independence-minded city in Taiwan, was not in need of a recall. So Chen took a different approach: He made the case that unification with China would be too expensive to work. The argument was unusual. Most of the time, we hear that Taiwan should remain free out of respect for democracy and self-determination, but cost? That is not part of the usual script, and
All 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers and suspended Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安), formerly of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), survived recall elections against them on Saturday, in a massive loss to the unprecedented mass recall movement, as well as to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that backed it. The outcome has surprised many, as most analysts expected that at least a few legislators would be ousted. Over the past few months, dedicated and passionate civic groups gathered more than 1 million signatures to recall KMT lawmakers, an extraordinary achievement that many believed would be enough to remove at