We Want Attorney Regulation Act Amendment, Attorneys Refuse to Be the Judiciary's Recycling Bin! ~ Press Conference on the Attorney Regulation Act Amendment

The current Attorney Regulation Act stipulates that attorneys must be guided by the spirit of "self-governance and self-discipline" to fulfill their mission of "protecting human rights, realizing social justice, and promoting democratic the rule of law." In addition, the Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, adopted by the United Nations in Havana in 1990, stipulates that, given the full protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms enjoyed by all individuals, everyone must be effectively provided with legal services by "independent" legal professionals. Therefore, through individual cases to resolve legal disputes, as well as supervising and preventing the abuse of power by authorities to persecute the people, attorneys invariably require the guarantee of independence and the principle of self-governance and self-discipline.

However, 23 years have passed since the comprehensive overhaul of the Attorney Regulation Act in 1992, and the outdated Attorney Regulation Act has become the greatest obstacle to the aforementioned goals. The deficiencies of the current law include: attorneys and attorney organizations being supervised and controlled by the Ministry of Justice, and bar associations lacking the power to review memberships, resulting in ineffective self-governance and self-discipline functions. Furthermore, the organization and institutional design of the current Taiwan Bar Association are both insufficient to shoulder the functions of self-governance and self-discipline, and pre-practice training for attorneys suffers from poor results due to insufficient resources.

Moreover, in criminal proceedings, attorneys stand on the opposite side of prosecutors, yet the Ministry of Justice (the competent authority for prosecutors) serves as the competent authority for the attorney profession, and the Ministry of Justice has the power to revoke or annul attorney qualifications. Even more seriously, the Ministry of Justice has failed to establish reasonable thresholds for attorney practice like advanced countries do, with the result that corrupt judges and prosecutors, even if convicted of corruption offenses, can still transition to practicing attorneys after being released from prison under the current Attorney Regulation Act. Such cases have broken the hearts of bar associations on multiple occasions! Compared to local bar associations, the Taiwan Bar Association clearly lacks resources, making it difficult to accomplish the tasks of attorney self-governance and self-discipline. In addition, attorney pre-practice training is currently the responsibility of the Taiwan Bar Association, but the Ministry of Justice only provides meager funding. Compared to advanced countries such as Germany and Japan, the government can be said to pay very little attention to the "defense" among the judiciary, prosecution, and defense! Insufficient resources naturally affect the quality of legal services and, more seriously, affect the rights and interests of the public.

Whether the attorney system is sound or not is not only related to the quality of the judiciary, but is also closely connected to the upholding of national democracy and the rule of law. Over the years, despite continuous appeals from civil society and the submission of various versions to the Ministry of Justice for research and reference, the draft amendments have failed to pass for a long time, which threatens to severely erode the public-interest role of attorneys. We hereby urge legislators to swiftly pass the draft amendments to the Attorney Regulation Act during this legislative session to achieve the mission of protecting human rights and realizing social justice.

附件下載

Draft Amendments to the Attorney Regulation Act (Version proposed by Legislator Yu Mei-yu and others)

新聞連絡人

JRF Deputy Executive Director / Attorney Ch'en Yü-fan 02-2523-1178