Please! Can a Judicial Reform "Conference" Really Be Held Like This?

Tsai Ing-wen's promise to convene a national judicial reform conference has sparked boundless imagination. Holding it the way they did in 1999 was clearly not a success; it merely brought judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and academics together behind closed doors. Not only was the voice of the people still absent, but it also inevitably drew the familiar criticism of being "top-down" rather than serving as an ideal model. Yet, from 1999 right up to the present, everyone has been pondering the exact same question: Where are the "users of the judiciary"?

Those who use the judicial system—that is, the "stakeholders" of the judiciary—deserve reforms tailored to their needs. However, the fundamental problems of democratic politics naturally surface alongside this: If direct democracy is not yet technically feasible, how do we practice representation? Who can represent whom? How are issues decided? How do we discuss them? How do we make decisions? Although the ideas may not yet be fully mature, we have seen a glimmer of hope from the vTaiwan team, which successfully acted as a intermediary platform to collect opinions, facilitate online discussions, formulate recommendations, and ultimately lead the executive branch to make decisions on the issues of "Uber" and "Airbnb".

The Success of vTaiwan in Internet-Based Issues

The vTaiwan team has generously shared with us that the original intention in designing this "multi-stakeholder dialogue platform" was to assist civil servants in decision-making. In their view, Taiwan actually possesses a quite favorable tradition of "civil service neutrality"; indeed, Taiwan had civil servants even before it had democratic politics.

Taiwan's civil servants are exceptional and are often best positioned to propose solutions. Unfortunately, within Taiwan's nascent democratic politics, civil servants often hesitate to take bold action to avoid a dynamic where "success brings no reward, but mistakes bring liability," leading them to adopt a mindset of "doing nothing is better than doing wrong." Even for critical issues, if the controversy is large, they tend to be shelved. However, leaving things shelved indefinitely is not a viable solution, as it only leads to an endless stream of subsequent petitions and protests. Civil servants frequently find themselves caught in a dilemma.

Driven by the goal of resolving this dilemma for civil servants, vTaiwan built a platform allowing stakeholders to put forward opinions within a set timeframe, with administrative agencies committing to provide preliminary responses within seven days to facilitate further discussion and recommendations by stakeholders.

Because the entire discussion process is transparent, fully recorded, and accessible for follow-up by those unable to participate in real-time, participants' opinions gradually converge. As the core disputes of the issue and potential solutions are progressively narrowed down—even if their respective proposed solutions may not be entirely identical—the discussion process itself fosters a mutual understanding of similarities and differences. Rather than people talking past one another, they are at least able to understand why the other side speaks the way they do.

If a substantial number of stakeholders participate in the discussion, the ultimate decisions made by administrative and political officials will also possess a considerable degree of democratic legitimacy. Furthermore, this legitimacy stems not merely from "counting heads," but from a decision-making process that has already undergone multiple rounds of discussion and revision. Anyone can review the conference video recordings, verbatim transcripts, and explanatory briefing slides via the internet, proving that it is a "deliberative" and undeniably "sincere" decision.

The Advantages and Limits of the Virtual World

Of course, the aforementioned textual description is somewhat abstract; readers can better grasp it by directly visiting the vTaiwan website. However, such a dialogue platform has an inherent limitation: stakeholders who care about a given issue are generally internet users. Services like Uber and Airbnb, for example, are clearly utilized by internet-using demographics.

There are numerous issues in judicial reform, and most stakeholders may not be internet users. If the internet-using population does not reach a certain threshold, discussions and participation will lack enthusiasm—this is both the advantage and the limitation of the virtual world. While the internet offers the possibility of universal participation in judicial reform issues, technical barriers simultaneously exclude a considerable number of stakeholders.

Consequently, a significant number of physical platforms may be necessary. Beyond the judicial reform issues suited for online discussion, other issues can be discussed on physical platforms using the same principles of interaction and communication. Of course, the primary challenge to overcome in operating physical platforms remains how to lower the barriers to entry and attract citizens to participate in discussions.

This is truly no small engineering feat for judicial reform. If it can be sustained, it will undoubtedly be far more meaningful than a three-day, ritualistic national judicial reform conference. This is because these activities themselves constitute a project aimed at "empowering the public with legal literacy," rather than merely being a dazzling fireworks display that ends and returns things to normalcy as if nothing ever happened.

Writing this, I cannot help but recall that while people generally support "citizen participation in trials," they remain divided on whether to adopt a lay assessor system (Sankanshin) or a jury system. Upon calm and careful reflection, perhaps trial after trial by jury serves precisely as a physical platform to empower the general public's legal literacy. After all, what could better attract people to discuss than real, and even controversial, cases? And what could count as deeper participation than actually serving as a judge?

We sincerely look forward to Tsai Ing-wen convening a "judicial reform conference" that deepens democracy, and we hope it will be much more than just a simple "meeting."

※This article was published on PNN Public Television Service News Issue Center on February 22, 2016