What’s Wrong With Justice in Taiwan?

 

There are so many things wrong with justice in Taiwan. Perhaps the root of the most serious problems lies in the misnomer of Taiwan’s judiciary being “independent.” What the judiciary itself and the government so proudly trumpet as a judicial system free of undue influence or control by the government is in reality a tight clique of inadequately prepared, narrow-minded, party-line demigods who are above and beyond the law, possessing the absolute power to interpret, bend, manipulate and subvert the law at will, accountable to no one and without any meaningful oversight or objective evaluation system to ensure they are performing their duties correctly.

As one official of the Judicial Yuan and another of the Control Yuan told me very matter-of-factly a couple years ago: The only way you can have a bad judge removed in Taiwan is to have indisputable proof of them in the act of accepting a bribe or their involvement in some other form of corruption. Judges in Taiwan are the “untouchables”, and as such they too often perform their duties with little or no regard for the island’s laws, evidence, reality, common sense or any regard for justice.

In a Sept. 3 editorial entitled “What has gone wrong with justice in Taiwan,” Lin Chia-Ho compares Taiwan’s judiciary to the Weimar Republic of Germany’s Kaiser at the end of World War I.

In his comparison, Lin states that “Judges under the Weimar Republic handled cases according to their own likes and dislikes. Defendants with whom they sympathized were let off lightly, but when it came to someone a judge disliked the law was often strictly interpreted and the harshest penalty imposed.”

This kind of subjective, biased treatment has been one of the hallmarks of Taiwan’s modern-day courts. And, of course, this sort of treatment is applied in many different ways. In my case, I was the “foreign” plaintiff the judges disliked and the judges manipulated the proceedings, their interpretations of relevant laws, and the decision so that the Taiwanese defendants were not found guilty of anything. In one instance, Dr. Tsay Show-Liu, nursing university chairperson, had broken the law by revealing my name in the email sent to colleagues, but the judges totally ignored the law and accepted the defendant’s flimsy claim that it was necessary to spread my name to protect other students. This all before I had been notified of the false allegation, before my first meeting with the investigation committee and long before the decision was made by the school. Equally disturbing, the judges disregarded another fact that after the allegation was reported, the nursing university continued to allow me to teach all my classes as usual AND an optional 2-week summer English course – a period spanning 5 weeks. If as they claimed in court that I was a “danger to other students,” why didn’t they just release me from my remaining courses while the investigation proceeded and maintain my privacy as REQUIRED by law. Both the accuser’s and the accused’s identities are supposed to be protected under the Gender Equity in Education law.

In addressing the fallacy of the Taiwanese government’s claims of an independent, unbiased judiciary, Lin later writes “Ironically, it was judicial independence and abstract legal concepts that provided those judges with the ability to abuse their power and a fig leaf to cover their abuses. Although the Weimar Republic had constitutional protections; the problem was that its judges did not apply them equally to allies and opponents. In effect, this was a kind of institutional state violence.”

Taiwan is full of just this kind of institutional state abuse and corruption.

You can read the rest of what Prof. Lin had to say at What has gone wrong with justice in Taiwan?