Wed, Jan 19, 2011 - Page 8, TAIPEI TIMES
By Lin Feng-jeng 林峰正
Jan. 11 was Law Day in Taiwan. By coincidence, the draft judges’ law, delayed for more than 20 years, passed its first reading in the legislature shortly before Law Day. Barring unforeseen circumstances, the bill should be passed into law during the next legislative session.
The problem is that if the bill goes through as it stands, it will not only fail to get rid of “dinosaur” judges, but will incubate, hatch and foster even more “dinosaur” judges.
Take for example the mechanism for removing incompetent judges from their posts or the system for evaluating judges. The Judicial Yuan unabashedly insists on keeping the evaluation system within its own walls and even rejects demands from civic groups that representatives of judges, prosecutors, lawyers and other professional groups that sit on evaluation committees be elected by those groups. Instead, the Judicial Yuan wants to give its own president, the Ministry of Justice and the Bar Association the power to appoint committee members.
The draft law also provides that the six evaluation committee members who are supposed to be academics and upstanding citizens would be selected by having the legislature, the Control Yuan and the Judicial Yuan each appoint two people.
Anyone can see that this arrangement gives the nation’s president, whose party holds a majority of seats in the legislature and who has the power to appoint the chiefs of the Control and Judicial yuans, complete control over the appointment of all six academic and -upstanding citizen committee members. That would clearly not be in keeping with the political principles of checks and balances and division of power.
Even more absurdly, the wording of the current draft of the law flies in the face of a consensus that had existed between civic groups and the Judicial Yuan for many years, in that the bill does not allow parties to judicial cases to lodge complaints about the judges who handle their cases.
去年夏天幾起司法風紀事件，還有幾個被稱為「恐龍判決」所引發的爭議，讓延宕多年的法官法立法，在「順時應勢」的氣氛下，迅速於農曆年前完成一讀，似乎再加把勁，短期內便能通過立法。但這真的是司法改革向前走了一大步嗎？
