UPDATE (Dec 20/08): The approval I gave to the KMT in this post was entirely unwarranted. A year-and-a-half after this post was written, Taiwanese police were still conducting household inspections.
Unaccustomed as I am to putting up headings like that, I think this time it's deserved:
The [Taiwanese] legislature [on Tuesday] abolished a 60-year-old system in which the police were responsible for carrying out household inspections, in a move experts said would improve public order and advance the protection of basic human rights.
My place has never been inspected by the local police, so I had no idea this relic of the martial law era was still in place. Or that it was EVER in place, for that matter. The opportunities it once provided Big Brother are not difficult to fathom:
"In the past, the inspection system was often used as an excuse for the police to enter people's homes and collect information about ordinary people," [the Vice-Minister of the Interior] said when the amendment was presented to the legislature for a preliminary review in March.
Now to be fair, the Chinese Nationalist Party framed their arguments in terms of police efficiency, rather than human rights:
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇), who had proposed the amendment, said that the objective of the revision was to lessen the burden on the police force….
Wu said the original regulations had required the police to spend a total of 801,840 hours a month conducting household inspections nationwide, given the assumption that each officer needed an average of 20 hours per month to carry out the task.
"If an officer is on duty for 240 hours per month, the removal of the duty would be equivalent to having 3,341 more police officers in the country," Wu said. [emphasis added]
Nevertheless, KMT claims of pragmatism in no way change the bottom line that they're doing the right thing.
One quick media coverage observation: the Taipei Times (no friend of the KMT) was quick to credit the Chinese Nationalist Party. (Third paragraph in a front page story). Yet the China Post, a pro-KMT paper, failed to mention the KMT's role in the legislation even once.
Hey fellas, why the sudden bashfulness here about praising your own side?
UPDATE (Jun 11/07): Sunday's Taipei Times editorial gave a brief summary of the former system for home inspections:
Those who are familiar with the practice of household inspection know that it was a practice under which police officers would periodically knock on the door of each home and ask to examine the identification cards of the individuals in that home to see if they conformed with the household registration and to see if there was anything suspicious about the residence. The police did not need to have any reasonable or grounded suspicion about criminal activities before requesting entry. This practice was far removed from Western practices under which police cannot enter private households without either a search warrant issued by a court or an urgent need to stop the perpetration of crime.
[…]
Generally speaking, in the past, when a police officer conducted a household inspection, he was supposed to ensure that the inhabitants of a house were the people whose residence was registered at that household. If there were strangers in the house, the police were supposed to find out whether there were any suspicious circumstances underlying the guests' presence.
The more I think about this, the more I wonder if the KMT's spearheading of this law is simply an effort on their part to make up for their (absurd) defense of Chiang Kai-shek with Taiwanese voters. Which would be a more cynical interpretation than the one I gave earlier.