Part II: Taiwan And The Process Of The Rule Of Law

[Part I of this series can be found here.]

On December 8th, the Heritage Foundation invited the Taiwanese government to give a response to a November 25th seminar which was critical of the rule of law in Taiwan.

The government's seminar
is about an hour and forty five minutes long.  The Taipei Times reviewed this on Friday, and Michael Turton gave his own thoughts earlier today.  Both reviews are worth reading.

A rough outline of the Heritage Foundation's December 8th seminar:

00:00 — 06:48  Introductions

06:49 — 20:00  KMT legislator and Judiciary Committee member Hsieh Kuo-liang's statements.  Seemed affable enough.

20:00 — 30:48  Taiwan's Ministry of Justice Chin Jeng-shyang thrills everyone in the audience with organizational charts of the Taiwanese legal bureaucracy.  Contrary to the Taipei Times' account, I found this part WAS audible — but the Times was right about Chin not being able to read his own writing.

(Paragraph-upon-paragraph of full text loving reproduced onto PowerPoint screens.  If you're like me, you'll find yourself impatiently wondering what the point of all this was.)

30:49 — 43:47  National Police Agency Senior Executive Officer John Chu attempts to excuse actions of Taiwanese police during the visit of an unofficial representative of the Chinese government.  Didn't much care for the way he barked at the audience.

At 38:14 Chu claims the Taiwanese police didn't confiscate flags — they only prevented protesters from crossing into restricted areas.  Mighty peculiar then, that only people carrying PRC flags were left unmolested by Chu's policemen.

43:48 — 51:28   Yates asks the panelists when they think preventative detention is appropriate, and what reforms (if any) should be made to the current law.

Hsieh proposes tinkering with the duration of preventative detention, but seems quite comfortable with the underlying premise that the accused is guilty until proven innocent.

51:29 — 52:59  More Q&A

53:00 — 54:30  Hsieh informs the audience that Taiwan has no laws against purgery, and this is the reason the Taiwanese government breaks client-lawyer confidentiality.  (The Ministry of Justice apparently videotapes all conversation between people kept in preventative detention and their attorneys.)

54:31 — 1:17:09  More Q&A

1:17:10 — 1:20:47  Gerritt van der Wees calls John Chu on some of the more dishonest elements of his presentation. 

News to me was van der Wees claim that the suggestion to throw eggs at the Chinese representative was never serious:  it was instead a sly pun a reporter made based on the similarity in Mandarin between the words "egg" and "missile".

John Chu sticks to his guns, insisting that Taiwanese independence party politicians offered cash prizes for hitting the Chinese envoy on TV. 

Evidence please, Mr. Chu.

1:20:48 — 1:44:48  More Q&A

I've seen earlier reports that these three KMT representatives were sent to the U.S. with Goebbelesque pictures of smiling children giving flowers to Taiwanese police — as "proof" that reports of police brutality in Taiwan have been exaggerated. 

Unfortunately, they didn't show them at their Heritage Foundation talk.  Would've been fun to see the incredulous reaction if they had.

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UPDATE (Dec 20/08):  My impression of Hsieh Kuo-liang may have been a tad too generous.  From Saturday's Johnny Neihu:

Alright, so LA is not a model city for police-suspect relations, but dude, next time you want to make a wisecrack about the Rodney King beating and the riots following his attackers’ acquittal, don’t do it at The Heritage Foundation!

Yeah.  You go to the Heritage Foundation (a think-tank populated by conservatives and neo-conservatives) and then try to get them to accept the specious logic that Taiwan can't have a police brutality problem, because Los Angeles has that problem instead.

Neihu's right.  Think-tanks don't generally hire people who are dumb enough to believe that.

Mr Hsieh, your audience thought you were a complete tool. And it doesn’t help a government’s image when a patronizing showman who loves talking about himself in the same breath as he slanders an unindicted suspect (by referring to him as a likely criminal) is the head of the legislative Judiciary, Organic Laws and Statutes Committee.