Minister of Justice Yeh Chin-feng (
At the ministry's year-end press conference yesterday, Yeh announced policy directions for next year, which include carrying out various reforms proposed for the prosecutorial system, reviewing laws and drafting new legislation and tough new measures against crime.
Looking back at this year, Yeh said she has high regards for every member of the ministry for their hard work over the year.
She outlined a number of achievements for the ministry, from overhauling the existing legal framework to playing an active role in pushing for various judicial reform plans.
However, a few prosecutors in the ministry and non-governmental reform activists disagreed with Yeh's assessment, giving the ministry low marks for its performance.
"The ministry gets a failing score this year because its rigid stance has put off implementation of reform for another ten years at least," said Sue Wang (
Referring to the ministry's anti-reform stance throughout the National Judicial Reform Foundation conference last July, Wang said Yeh used her veto rights at the decision-making level to block implementation of major proposals agreed to by conference delegates.
"Her vote denied all the efforts of others. It's really a tremendous responsibility," Wang said.
For many in the legal community, the National Judicial Reform Conference marked the biggest event of the year, where fundamental changes to the island's legal system were recommended by representatives from the court system, the prosecutorial system, bar associations, academics and social critics.
On a variety of matters relating to the working of the court system -- such as making the system a more adversarial one -- the ministry expressed strong opposition and had heated quarrels with other conference representatives who were pushing strongly for more reform.
While the decision-making body of the reform conference finalized the conclusions of the conference, Yeh vetoed some of the major proposals and has been harshly criticized for her actions ever since.
Chen Jui-jen (
"Don't talk the official language in a standard manner. Please tell us what you think of reforming the system and give us concrete ideas about it. Until you do, we can't continue discussions with you," Chen told the minster.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS