Judicial Reform as a Practice: Reflections from a Summer 2017 Intern

Although I majored in political science, ever since attending the JRF camp in high school, I knew I wanted to intern here in college. I wasn't sure what a political science background could contribute to the JRF, and initially, I was ready to just do odd jobs or administrative work. However, the Taichung Office allowed me to handle cases, directly engage with clients, and even participate in defense team rescue meetings.

During the two months of my internship, I handled a total of 10 cases, covering public endangerment, land surveying, the Anti-Corruption Act, and medical law. Although I lacked a professional legal background and often encountered legal terms and procedures I did not understand when reviewing judicial documents, I was able to find answers by looking up statutes and relevant materials, and by consulting other interns.

Through the internship, I gradually came to realize from frontline practical experience that the JRF is not only an advocacy group; it more practically provides channels to assist the public in navigating complex legal systems, thereby revealing the roles of NGO workers and pro bono lawyers within this organization.

Our Stories, Their Lives

The case that left the deepest impression on me was a land dispute from 1965 [ROC year 55, or 1966 depending on exact calendar conversion, but keeping text flow]. I knew this was not an entertaining story, but someone's real life.

Therefore, when I first looked at this case, I held high ambitions: I wanted to clearly organize the contents of the client's criminal complaint, the judge's judgment, and the prosecutor's non-prosecution disposition so that if an opportunity for rescue arose in the future, future assistants could easily and quickly grasp the complete legal issues and ambiguities in the judgment.

I remembered on my first day at the Taichung Office, Su Chien-wen was giving a speech, and he said: 'If you kick a stone on the road, if you have the ability, you should move the stone out of the way.' Perhaps I could only nudge the stone a little bit, but that could still make the stone occupy slightly less of the road and make it just a little bit easier for pedestrians to pass.

This expectation was gradually worn down after reading the judicial documents.

The contents of the judgments were identical, over and over again; the contents of the appeal briefs, criminal complaints, and non-prosecution dispositions hardly changed a bit. The trial process kept repeating the same routine, like a fixed formula.

When I was losing patience facing a stack of case files, the director wrote in the feedback log: 'The cases that come to us are difficult ones; they are at the very end of the judicial line, and they have likely exhausted all judicial avenues without receiving understanding. Therefore, when providing assistance, please be sure to be attentive, meticulous, and even let your imagination run wild with every possible scenario.'

When a case enters a civil society organization and civil forces are mobilized to rescue it, it perhaps highlights the dysfunction of government agencies. The training I received in the political science department taught me not only about government systems, but more importantly, that everyone is small when facing the government and the state apparatus. It possesses far greater power than we do to restrict us. When clients face the justice system and feel aggrieved, fighting lawsuits to the very end—reaching the end of the judicial pipeline and entering the JRF—we must be more meticulous, more rational (while retaining our empathy) in reviewing these case files and getting close to the clients' situations. This is the greatest comfort we, as NGO workers, can offer to a client's life. Although the stacks of case files spread out before me are just piles of paper, to the clients, they are the reasons their trust in justice has been repeatedly extinguished. I am not the client; these words that may seem light as a feather in my eyes are as heavy as Mount Tai in their lives.

The JRF as a Non-Profit Organization

In this internship, I came into contact with various cases and observed different attitudes among clients. Practitioners in non-profit organizations are a group of highly idealistic people; their salaries are not high, and they grow more indignant than anyone else when justice fails to inspire public trust. They must find ways to achieve their goals with limited resources. As a voluntary organization, the JRF helps correct and supplement the government's failures, serving as an indispensable mediating force in a mature and stable democratic society.