People’s satisfaction with the justice system has risen 13.8 percentage points from 2017 and the nation’s international ranking on judicial effectiveness has risen in the past few years, Judicial Yuan President Hsu Tzong-li (許宗力) said on Aug. 25.
A Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation poll showed that 48.5 percent of respondents in May said they were satisfied with the judicial system, up from 34.7 percent in May 2017, while 39.5 percent said they were unsatisfied, down from 55 percent in 2017, Hsu told a news conference in Taipei.
Meanwhile, the US-based Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of Economic Freedom listed Taiwan with a score of 94.7 in the judicial effectiveness subindex, up from 69.2 in 2018, placing it among the publication’s top-ranked countries, he said.
Photo: CNA
The Heritage Foundation says that the judicial effectiveness subindex seeks to measure the fairness and efficacy of a nation’s judicial system,
That score indicates that Taiwan’s justice system and has grown significantly in the past few years, he said.
Over the past six years, the government has implemented the citizen judge system, implemented the Constitutional Court Procedure Act (憲法訴訟法) and the Labor Incident Act (勞動事件法), he said.
He also cited new legal statutes for enhanced measures under the Trade Secrets Act (營業秘密法), and a series of amendments to provide better protection to victims of crime and establishing a mechanism for alternative dispute resolutions.
Minister of Justice Tsai Ching-hsiang (蔡清祥) said that the ministry has also implemented major changes, including measures to enhance victims’ rights and a comprehensive system for financial compensation for victims or their families.
In cases of death, a family could receive up to NT$1.8 million (US$56,495), while in incidents of serious injury, a victim could receive NT$800,000 to NT$1.6 million, NT$400,000 to NT$100,000 for sexual assault and NT$200,000 for incidents in foreign countries, Tsai said.
For example, the family of a 21-year-old university student, who was killed in late July by an air-conditioning unit that fell from a window in New Taipei City, received NT$1.8 million after a swift review by the ministry, he said.
He also cited the ministry’s efforts to crack down on telecom fraud, saying that it had recovered NT$2.37 billion in illegal profits from such groups in the first seven months of the year, more than 4.7 times the amount recovered during the same period last year.
Last year, the ministry confiscated 9.9 tonnes of illegal drugs, up 53 percent from 2017, he added.
The government efforts have also curtailed accidental deaths from drugs, saying that overdose fatalities fell to six last year, down from 37 in 2021 and 93 in 2020, he said.
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