Human rights activists take Chen to task
2001/12/7
The China Post staff
Local human rights activists took President Chen Shui-bian to task yesterday
for trying to interfere in the local judiciary during recent elections.
A report on the top ten human rights issues for 2001 released by the Taiwan
Association for Human Rights (TAHR) claimed that comments made by the president
on the campaign trail blatantly violated the basic principle of the accused
being presumed innocent.
TAHR chairman Lin Fong-jeng said that Chen, himself a former lawyer with experience in human rights cases, should know better than to comment on a trial or investigation currently underway.
Specifically, the president publicly remarked earlier this year that there was still a hoodlum in northern Taiwan needing to be prosecuted.
Almost immediately thereafter, prosecutors moved to list independent lawmaker Lo Fu-ju as a hoodlum.
Chen also made thinly veiled comments about a gangster in Taichung who would be put in jail so that he would never be able to serve a term in the Legislative Yuan even if he managed to get himself elected.
The president was apparently referring to former Taichung County Council speaker Yen Ching-piao, who is being held incommunicado pending trial. At the present it is not clear if Yen will be allowed to leave his cell to be sworn in to his new post.
The Presidential Office declined to comment on the report.
However, recently presidential aides have indicated that Chen's comments were not scripted but rather appeared to be improvisational elements added in the course of making a speech.
Aides said the president's intention was to increase voters' confidence in the justice system and not to interfere in the judicial process itself.
Among the five stories that the TAHR said reflected negatively on the human rights situation in Taiwan, top billing was given to the plight of workers at a RCA-invested plant who were apparently exposed to toxic organic solvents.
The TAHR's Lin said that even though a self-help committee was set up by plant workers four years ago, to date exposed RCA employees have yet to receive any compensation.
The TAHR is preparing to file a lawsuit against RCA on behalf of workers in cooperation with a number of local organizations.
Also on the down side, the report made mention of the inability of a man jailed for a series of rapes to be let out on parole so that he could enroll in the prestigious National Taiwan University.
The convict, the so-called "Hua-Kang wolf", was denied parole after testing into the school's Department of Sociology.
At the time, faculty, students, and members of the general community questioned the wisdom of allowing a man convicted of preying on young women onto a university campus after serving just six years of his sentence.
But according to Lin, the convict probably would have been released if he had tested into a different, lower profile university.
Also on the list of human rights demerits were the kidnapping of prostitutes by members of the Taipei police force, and the detention of the crew aboard the Greek cargo ship Amorgos after an oil spill off the coast of Kenting.
On the more positive side, though, the human rights organization congratulated the Legislative Yuan for passing a bill in January that upgraded the status of aboriginal citizens.
The Executive Yuan also got kudos for approving the passage of two international rights treaties.
The abandoning of an attempt by the central government to set up a national data base of fingerprints of the entire Taiwan population also drew praise from the organization.
On the legal front, the report praised the Supreme Court for overturning an long-standing precedent that had been used to argue that parties were guilty until proven innocent.
At the same time, a move by the armed forces to reduce the number of crimes that bore a mandatory death sentence.