Senior prosecutor Tsai Chiu-ming (蔡秋明), who has been nominated by President William Lai (賴清德) to lead the Judicial Yuan, yesterday said his top priority would be to address the shortage of judges and widespread overwork.
Speaking at a Legislative Yuan review of his nomination, Tsai said one of the most pressing challenges that Taiwan’s judicial system faces is a shortage of judges, which in turn contributes to the heavy caseload borne by those on the bench.
Asked by Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lin Tai-hua (林岱樺) how he would address these problems, Tsai said he would first seek to relax regulations under the Court Organization Act (法院組織法) and push to increase the staffing quota for judges.
Photo: Wang Yi-song, Taipei Times
According to Judicial Yuan data, there were 2,199 judges as of last year, including eight justices on the Constitutional Court, with the rest serving in the Supreme Court, lower courts and other specialized courts.
The data also showed that last year alone, approximately 4.4 million cases were filed in the courts, of which 4 million — or 91.6 percent — were newly lodged cases and 367,448 were previously filed cases.
Tsai said he would work to reduce judges’ paperwork burdens — such as preparing verdict documents — and retain more support staff to assist judges with case reviews by raising their salaries.
He would also plan to decriminalize some minor offenses, broaden the range of complaint-based prosecutions and promote out-of-court dispute resolution mechanisms to reduce the number of cases entering the judicial system, he said.
Moreover, to improve the public’s trust in the judiciary, Tsai said he would publish transparent sentencing guidelines and let the public engage with the process.
His reform efforts would also focus on protecting victims’ rights, Tsai added.
Asked by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hsu Yu-chen (許宇甄) about ending the death penalty, Tsai said that he did not support its abolition.
He supports Constitutional Judgement No. 8, he said.
The judgement in September last year determined that capital punishment is constitutional, but should be limited to “exceptional” cases.
Asked by Hsu whether Constitutional Judgement No. 8 was a de facto abolition of the death penalty, Tsai did not agree, but said that it did make issuing such sentences difficult.
Hsu asked Tsai about the court’s judgement requiring death penalty verdicts to be unanimous and if it was based on precedent.
In his experience, such verdicts were already generally reached unanimously, although he had no statistics on hand, Tsai said.
Tsai has served as a prosecutor for 29 years and is a senior prosecutor at the High Prosecutors’ Office.
He was in late March nominated by Lai as both a Constitutional Court justice and the president of the Judicial Yuan, which oversees the Constitutional Court.
The Constitutional Court has been without nearly half of its normal panel of 15 justices since the terms of seven justices ended in October last year and opposition legislators rejected all of the president’s nominees to fill the vacancies in December last year.
Apart from Tsai, Lai also nominated six other justices — two Supreme Court judges, one senior prosecutor and three legal academics — to fill the Constitutional Court openings.
With only eight judges, the Constitutional Court cannot hear cases due to a minimum requirement of 10 justices to open court.
However, opposition legislators have also voiced concerns over Tsai’s qualifications to head the Judicial Yuan, citing his experience as being limited to prosecutorial affairs.
If his nomination is confirmed by the legislature on July 25, he would become the first prosecutor to head the Judicial Yuan.
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