Did the Sunflower Movement Reveal the True Face of the Judiciary?

The civic movement against the black-box Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement began on June 21, 2013, when the agreement was signed. It reached its peak on March 18 of the following year with the occupation of the Legislative Yuan, which simultaneously sparked a series of street protests and occupation actions. Taiwan witnessed hundreds of people occupying the parliamentary chamber for 24 days, thousands occupying the Executive Yuan, nearly a thousand passing by the Zhongzheng First Police Precinct, and various other sporadic protests.

Taking to the streets in protest is the people's right to express their opinions to the government. How did the state respond to these voices after 318? If we view the investigative procedures of police officers and prosecutors as well as the trial procedures of the courts as a broad judicial process, what I saw was that those in power "once again" used the "judiciary" to carry out their means of suppressing the people's voices, while the "judiciary" willingly degenerated into a tool for the state to strike down dissidents.

Let us turn back the clock to November 2008, during Ch'en Yün-lin's visit to Taiwan, when police violence not only triggered the Wild Strawberry Movement to protest the unconstitutionality of the Assembly and Parade Act, but civic groups also formed a volunteer lawyers' group to assist citizens in filing criminal charges for assault and deprivation of liberty, as well as state compensation lawsuits against the violent police officers.

The ultimate "judicial result" of the Ch'en Yün-lin incident was that none of the participating police officers bore criminal responsibility, and only one citizen surnamed Chiang, whose head was beaten open, was awarded NT$300,000 in state compensation. As for whether the Assembly and Parade Act was unconstitutional, the Grand Justices did not issue Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 718 until March 21, 2014, three days after the 318 action.

However, Interpretation No. 718 merely made the conservative declaration that the "prior permit system" for "urgent and spontaneous" assemblies and parades was unconstitutional. Regarding the core issue truly concerning assemblies and parades—whether general assemblies and parades should instead adopt a "post-event notification system"—the Grand Justices remained completely silent.

From the accountability of police responsibility to the infringement upon the people's freedoms of assembly, parade, and speech, these issues were never resolved after the Ch'en Yün-lin incident. The connivance of the "judiciary" led the state to act with impunity, and the tragedies of illegal abuse of power and the use of violence never ceased. This result was unfortunately reaffirmed once again during the 318 anti-black-box service trade mass movement.

The Ghost of the Police State Reemerges

In the early morning of March 24, 2014, as images spread widely of police violently driving away peacefully occupying crowds at the Executive Yuan with batons and shields, the entire nation was in an uproar. Under the deliberate cover of the police force, those who struck the blows became the hardest people to find in all of Taiwan. Facing lawmakers' questions as to why these police officers still could not be found, National Police Agency Director-General Wang Cho-chün simply brushed it off by saying, "My ability is not very good." Wang Cho-chün was none other than the Director-General of the National Police Agency when the 2008 Ch'en Yün-lin incident broke out.

And in places where cameras could not reach, other forms of state violence were quietly playing out. As the ghost of the police state reemerged, unease and fear permeated people's hearts.

Late March of last year, while the occupation of the Legislative Yuan was ongoing, the JRF office received a cry for help. The caller was a student studying in Taipei. On the other end of the phone, he said uneasily that two men claiming to be police officers had brought a roster and gone directly to his home in the south yesterday. The police asked the student's mother, "Does student so-and-so live here?" and also said they would individually investigate everyone on the roster. The student said he did not know why the police were showing up at his door; he had not entered the legislative chamber, nor had he entered the Executive Yuan—he simply went to Qingdao East Road and Jinan Road every day to listen to short speeches.

After the March 24 Executive Yuan incident, a gentleman expressed his feelings on his Facebook page, saying that if things kept going like this, he would really want to charge the Presidential Office. The police are always astonishingly efficient in such cases. A few days later, the police showed up looking for him. When we protested to the officers that they had failed to issue a written summons in accordance with the law, the police replied contemptuously, "You want a summons, do you? How many copies do you want? I can make them for you right now." Later, the police notified the gentleman by phone that "the case is currently fine," and closed it with "please be mindful of your future remarks."

On the evening of April 11 last year, a senior high school student wearing his uniform was at the scene. Shortly after, his parents received a criminal case notification from the police. A certain citizen near Legislator Tsai Cheng-yuan's constituency office was subjected to an identity check and taken back to the police station for illegal detention for a night simply because they "resembled" a demonstrator in police evidence-gathering footage from a CTi News protest the previous day.

To investigate the March 24 Executive Yuan occupation case, the Criminal Investigation Corps of the Taipei City Police Department disregarded provisions such as the Medical Care Act and the Personal Data Protection Act, and directly issued official documents to several medical institutions demanding the inspection of outpatient registration records and medical records of all patients who went to the emergency rooms of these hospitals between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM on March 24. After this was exposed, the medical institutions that received the official documents claimed they would not violate the Medical Care Act by providing medical records to the police, but it is understood that the police had already secured a considerable list of names through the ambulance system!

This is just one of a few cases violating the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Police Power Exercise Act. The all-encompassing investigation by the police is the ghost of the police state reemerging. Has the era of "White Terror" truly never left us? When those in power treat the law as nothing and attempt to use the police as thugs for their ruling apparatus, Wang Cho-chün's absurd remark of "My ability is not very good" and Chiang Yi-huah's "I was sleeping that night" are no longer so surprising.

The Prosecutorial System Escorts the Police and Hunts Down the People

The prosecutorial system, whose duty is to supervise police investigative actions, turned a blind eye to police illegal actions while hunting down the people without the slightest hesitation. On February 20 this year, the Taipei District Prosecutors Office announced the investigative results of four cases: the March 18 occupation of the Legislative Yuan, the March 24 occupation of the Executive Yuan, the April 11 passing by the Zhongzheng First Precinct, and the April 23 blocking of vehicles at the Legislative Yuan. According to calculations based on data released by prosecutors, the Taipei District Prosecutors Office investigated a total of 180 people and indicted 121.

Among them, as many as 93 people were indicted for the March 24 Executive Yuan occupation incident, the vast majority of whom were prosecuted for allegedly committing the offense of intrusion upon a building without justifiable cause under Article 306 of the Criminal Code. This offense is a complaint-dependent crime, brought about because the Executive Yuan insisted on filing a complaint. In contrast, regarding the March 18 Legislative Yuan occupation incident, because the Legislative Yuan did not file a complaint, although the number of people who initially occupied the chamber reached the hundreds, the final number of people indicted was 22.

Following the March 318 Legislative Yuan occupation action, Minister of Justice Luo Ying-shay declared that students would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, regarding those who ordered the dispersal at the Executive Yuan and the police officers who inflicted injuries, there was zero effort toward accountability. It is no surprise that the prosecutorial system has been criticized as the government's hitman, carrying out a "judicial manhunt" against movement participants.

Setting aside the fact that the occupation of the Executive Yuan had its demands against the black-box service trade agreement, as well as its antecedent context connected to the occupation of the Legislative Yuan, objectively speaking, many of the indicted individuals simply followed the crowd into the Executive Yuan, peacefully sitting in and shouting slogans: "Defend democracy! Return the service trade agreement!" Prosecutors failed to exercise their discretion for non-prosecution, and instead allowed all of this to become "criminal facts" on the indictment. Reading it is truly heartbreaking!

A Weak Judiciary Becomes an Accomplice

Following the March 24 Executive Yuan incident, more than 50 injured citizens successively filed private criminal prosecutions and state compensation lawsuits. Most of the presiding judges treated these cases like hot potatoes, successively issuing non-acceptance judgments or rulings of dismissal. Over the past year, these cases have continued to drift through the courts with zero progress.

As early as July 2013, before 318, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in Izci v. Turkey, bluntly criticizing the Turkish government for violating the "prohibition of torture" clause of the European Convention on Human Rights in its handling of women's day celebration demonstrations at Beyazıt Square in Istanbul in 2005.

The substance of the "prohibition of torture" clause is that the state must not only refrain from inflicting torture, but also has an affirmative obligation to hold perpetrators accountable and provide compensation to victims after torture occurs, without delay.

The European Court of Human Rights held that Turkish riot police deliberately concealed their identification marks, making it difficult for victims to identify them and causing delays in investigative and trial procedures. Furthermore, Turkey's judicial organs failed to actively investigate the criminal acts of high-ranking police officers or civil servants who ordered the dispersal. The entire state mechanism handling police violence, from the executive branch to the judiciary, had violated the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights regarding the "prohibition of torture."

Taiwan passed the Act to Implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2009, stipulating that the protection of personal freedom, the freedom of assembly and parade, and freedom of speech should align with international standards. Compared with the standards of the European Court of Human Rights, accountability should not be repeatedly delayed. For cases prosecuted by the prosecutors, presiding judges, acting as the conscience guarding human rights, should conduct fair trials at a constitutional level. This is our most humble expectation and plea for the judiciary.

Do Not Give Up, Must Not Forget

After Ch'en Yün-lin, has Taiwan's rule of law and human rights progressed? Regrettably, no. Under the illuminating mirror of 318, the state trampled on the law and completely failed to establish an efficient system of supervision, accountability, and compensation. Thus, we have continually been sacrificed, and to this day we remain utterly helpless.

On this anniversary of 318, it is our hope that the Legislative Yuan occupation action has truly awakened the people, that everyone will walk into the courtroom to listen to every single court hearing and care about the judiciary's annotations on this historical event, and that we will not let sacrificed rights and freedoms be forgotten amid lengthy litigation procedures. For if we give up investigating the truth and pursuing accountability, state violence will happen over and over again!