The Constitutional Court has a backlog of 354 public appeals still awaiting rulings while the court remains deadlocked.
On Friday last week, seven grand justice nominees selected by President William Lai (賴清德) were rejected by opposition lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan voting in the majority.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Tsung-hsien (吳宗憲) said that the party’s caucus had decided to reject all the nominees, as they “lacked the courage to say no to the ruling party.”
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
In December last year, an amendment passed by legislature changed a requirement so that a minimum of 10 justices must be present to hear or rule on cases, and a minimum of nine justices must agree to an unconstitutional ruling.
The court currently has eight justices, after the terms of seven expired in October last year and the legislature blocked both rounds of nominations.
Legal experts have said that the law functionally shuts down the Constitutional Court until new justices are confirmed.
They have also reported hesitancy among those in the legal field from accepting a nomination from Lai, as both previous sets of nominees were rejected.
Statistics from the court show that as of June 30, there were 385 unresolved cases, of which 354, or 92 percent, were public appeals.
A further 21 cases were petitioned by judges, five by government agencies and the last five were brought by lawmakers.
For example, the court has accepted petitions from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus to rule on the recent amendments to the Constitutional Court Procedure Act (憲法訴訟法) and the central government budget.
The Executive Yuan has also requested judgements on the government’s budget and the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法), which remain frozen along with the DPP’s petitions.
A controversial public petition awaiting constitutional redress is regarding the statute of limitations for sexual assault.
Statistics show that in the past 20 years, 1,097 plaintiffs have been unable to press charges due to the statute of limitations.
With the court frozen, it is unable to rule on the matter.
Other appeals from the public awaiting judgement include restrictions on adoption, overtime labor laws, pre-election polling and more.
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