More than half of Taiwanese say they do not believe in the credibility of the judiciary, a survey released yesterday by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-affiliated National Policy Foundation showed.
The survey found that 52.5 percent of respondents did not trust the credibility of the judicial system, compared with 34.2 percent who did.
It found that 57.6 percent did not believe that judges would try cases fairly, while 31.8 percent said they believed that they would.
Asked if they believed that “the Council of Grand Justices has not been subjected to improper interference, and interpret the Constitution objectively and fairly,” 52.6 percent said that they did not, while 29.7 percent said that they did, the foundation said.
Asked whether they understood President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) ideas and proposals on judicial reform, 83.8 percent said that they did not and 12.8 percent said that they did, the survey showed.
Asked whether they had confidence in the effectiveness of Tsai’s efforts to promote judicial reform, 46.8 percent said that they did not, while 43 percent said that they did, it showed.
The public’s lack of understanding of the president’s ideas and proposals for judicial reform should serve as a “major warning,” Chinese Culture University law professor Wu Yen-te (吳盈德) said at a news conference in Taipei.
Given that nearly half of the respondents in the survey were not confident in the reform of the judicial system, it appears that Tsai needs to work harder, he said.
Improving public confidence in the credibility of the judiciary should be seen as as a major task for the remainder of Tsai’s term in office, he added.
When Tsai was sworn in as president in 2016, she vowed to promote judicial reform and later held a national conference on judicial reform, with an aim of winning back public confidence in the judiciary, foundation internal and legal affairs committee convenor Huang Te-fu (黃德福) said.
However, surveys over the past five years have presented an “opposite” result, Huang said.
Judicial reform has “evaporated” during Tsai’s presidency, he said, urging the government to step up its reform efforts.
Instead of adopting a system in which the public participates in trials, it is more important to increase the number of judicial personnel, as having too many cases to handle could affect the quality of judgements, attorney Wang Han-hsing (王瀚興) said.
The survey was commissioned by the foundation and conducted by Taiwan Real Survey Co from April 20 to April 22. It was based on telephone interviews with 1,075 adults aged 20 or older, and had a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.99 percentage points, the foundation said.
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