A coalition of civic groups yesterday criticized the Presidential Office for giving the public just 16 days to recommend potential members for the Council of Grand Justices and called for more transparency in the nomination process.
The Presidential Office’s nomination committee on March 13 announced that it had begun accepting recommendations for four grand justice positions and set tomorrow as the deadline.
That left the public 16 days to seek candidates and even less time for groups that received the notification days after the announcement, Judicial Reform Foundation member Kao Yang-huei (高烊輝) said.
“Can ideal candidates really be found within such a short period of time?” Kao asked.
“We wonder if the little time given to the public was due to the nomination committee having set its mind on certain candidates,” he added.
When the committee announces its list of nominees, it should explain its reasons for selecting them and release information about their education, experience, finances and tax records, he said.
“If the nominee is an academic, the committee should offer information about their major publications; if they are a judge, then it should include cases they have judged, so that the public could examine their human rights awareness and assess their qualifications,” Kao said.
One-fourth of the Council of Grand Justices are women, but the ratio could change after four members step down on Sept. 30 at the end of their eight-year term, said Tseng Chao-yuan (曾昭媛), a senior research fellow at the Awakening Foundation.
If all the new appointees are men, the percentage of women in the council would drop to 13 percent, she said.
“If two of them were women, the ratio would stay at one-fourth, but we hope to have more female grand justices and to see the percentage of women go up to one-third,” Tseng said.
Hsueh Chih-jen (薛智仁), a board member of Taiwan Democracy Watch, said the Legislative Yuan should properly review the final nominee list before confirming it.
Legislative reviews of the president’s nominations have often been “cavalier,” Hsueh said.
For example, lawmakers in 2016 spent only three days reviewing seven grand justice candidates nominated by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), he said.
Instead of making the process a mere formality, the legislature should substantially review the nominees and require the Presidential Office to provide all relevant information about the nominees, he added.
The four grand justices scheduled to retire are Chen Be-yue (陳碧玉), Huang Hsi-chun (黃璽君), Lo Chang-fa (羅昌發) and Tang Te-tsung (湯德宗).
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