On Monday last week, Citizen Congress Watch released a statement calling for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) not to stand for election as co-convener of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee until a judicial investigation confirms her innocence in an ongoing legal case.
The statement also said that when deciding who to nominate as committee conveners, legislative caucuses of all parties should live up to public expectations by making sure to avoid conflicts of interest.
Third, they said that laws and regulations concerning the Legislative Yuan should be reviewed to establish a comprehensive system for avoiding conflicts of interest among legislators.
Citizen Congress Watch’s statement continues: “There is no lack of precedents in the Legislative Yuan of legislators accused in ongoing legal cases serving as committee conveners. In 2005, then-KMT legislator Ho Chih-hui (何智輝), who was barred from leaving the country because of his involvement in a legal case, nonetheless served as convener of the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee. Furthermore, Ho used his authority as committee convener to request that relevant judicial departments produce a special report concerning ‘restrictions on leaving the country’ and the ‘lack of openness in investigations.’”
Given his legal situation at the time, Ho’s inquiry about restrictions on leaving the country was a clear case of failing to avoid a conflict of interest.
A book published on July 31, 2020, about the “odyssey” of former minister of justice Morley Shih’s (施茂林) legal career contains the following passage on page 253: “KMT legislator Ho Chih-hui, who was investigated in connection with the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office’s investigation of a black gold [corruption money] hub and was barred from leaving the country, used the opportunity of his turn as convener of the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee to instruct the Ministry of Justice to prepare a ‘special report on restrictions on leaving the country.’ This move by Ho triggered a controversy over legislators involved in legal cases and their use of parliamentary interpolation to exert pressure on officials. This was the challenge that Shih encountered as he faced a special report for the first time as minister of justice.”
The book’s account of the affair goes on as follows: “When a pan-green legislator challenged him by asking whether the prosecutors would be put under pressure, Shih replied that ‘the prosecutors will have learned from bitter experience.’ Ho Chih-hui, who was seated on the podium, turned red in the face before paling to white and then turning blue. This was Shih’s typical style of couching his persistence in moderate tones, so that Ho could do nothing about it. Shih’s choice of words also upheld prosecutors’ dignity and won him the support of rank-and-file prosecutors.”
Ho was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison for bribery, but he has been on the run for many years and it is worth asking where he is now.
The aforementioned episode concerning Ho’s obvious failure to avoid a conflict of interest was recounted in an article published on May 1, 2005, in issue 278 of Wealth Magazine (財訊), in which the author Wang Mo-fei (王墨菲) said that as soon as Shih became minister of justice, he demonstrated a completely different style from his predecessor Chen Ding-nan (陳定南).
When faced with similar situations, Chen would often meet the attack head-on, strongly and sternly accusing whichever legislator posed the question of trashing and trampling on the judiciary. Shih, in contrast, was gentle as well as tough.
In addition to giving appropriate answers to legislators’ questions in public, he would also immediately arrange private meetings over dinner with members of the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee, in the hope of using backstage communication to avoid stirring up controversies or causing suspicion or rifts between himself and the legislators concerned.
Compared with Chen’s unwillingness to engage in give-and-take with opposition legislators and his almost complete lack of communication with them, Shih’s way of handling such matters was much more delicate.
Looking back on these events that took place nearly two decades ago, we can see how government officials felt powerless in the face of legislators’ overextended powers and could only respond by making compromises for the greater good and engaging the legislators in “backstage communication.”
However, considering how much Taiwan’s democracy and rule of law have developed since then, can the public still tolerate legislators’ overreach and their failure to avoid conflicts of interest?
This is an issue that merits more attention and deeper investigation.
Chen Yi-nan is an arbitrator.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS