Legislator’s document leak<\b>
There was a government document leak incident several years ago when I was working at a civil institution. There was a coworker on our team who was extremely diligent and circumspect about their duties.
One day when they were in the office, they suddenly had an emergency come up and inadvertently left a document with critical information where anyone could see.
The district prosecutors’ office later indicted my coworker, charging them with leaking national security secrets.
Fortunately, the judge on the case understood that this supposed criminal act was undoubtedly related to needing to rush off to an emergency, and was not an intentional act. The judge ultimately handed my coworker a lenient sentence.
In stark contrast, we have Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) publicly divulging contents from secret documents related to Ukraine. Hsu came straight out and intentionally revealed the payment methods and channels listed in the documents.
Not only did she damage the mutual trust between Taiwan and the Czech Republic, but she also unnecessarily made things more difficult for Taiwan’s assistance to Ukraine, even to the point of greatly lowering our national credibility in the eyes of other countries.
She is evidently a suspect in divulging secrets and intelligence. As a legislator, Hsu’s salary comes from the public purse. At the very least, she ought to be protecting classified documents.
If political power is used to intervene in judicial processes and she gets off scot-free, then what message does this send to civil servants on the bottom rungs who end up prosecuted for bona fide accidents? What an utter shame.
Yeh Yu-cheng,
Pingtung
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