Who Can the Legal Aid Foundation Help When It Can Hardly Help Itself?

According to reports, when the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee of the Legislative Yuan reviewed the budget of the Legal Aid Foundation (LAF) last month, lawmakers criticized the LAF for its poor fundraising capability, raising only slightly over NT$1 million annually and failing even to secure donations from lawyers. Lawmakers pointed out that the LAF has become a training ground for novice lawyers or an ATM for lawyers, demanding that the LAF increase its self-raised funds and consequently cutting and freezing NT$70 million of its budget—which is truly lamentable. Who exactly can this LAF, which can hardly even help itself, possibly assist?

Rooted in the Voluntary Dedication of Lawyers

Legal aid services in advanced countries and pre-modern China both originated from the pro bono services and voluntary dedication of lawyer communities. However, after a long period of time, it has been proven that simply calling upon lawyers to exercise public interest and voluntary dedication is insufficient to meet the massive demand for legal aid in modern society, where laws are as numerous as ox hairs, from impoverished individuals lacking resources to ordinary citizens who do not understand the law. Furthermore, in criminal matters—aside from mandatory defense for "felonies," court advocacy for defendants who lack financial means, intellectual disabilities, or indigenous status, or impoverished and helpless victims—there is a necessity for lawyers who do not charge market rates to participate in litigation. Therefore, many advanced countries have gradually combined legal aid with concepts such as mandatory defense, and proceeding from the "protection of the right to litigation" and "equal access to justice," have recognized that fully or partially financing legal aid services through the national budget is an important fundamental function and obligation of the modern state.

Although the current LAF is in the nature of a private "foundation," it adopted this "NGO" model at the time of its legislation to avoid excessive rigidity in bureaucratic organizations. Nevertheless, promoting legal aid affairs and providing necessary funds remain, by law, the responsibility of the "state," rather than the responsibility of the LAF—this is self-evident. Soliciting donations from the private sector is fundamentally not a "statutory obligation" for the LAF. If the LAF had to rely on self-raised funds to secure the necessary capital, would not the provisions and legislative intent of the Legal Aid Act be reduced to empty words? Thus, lawmakers' criticism of the LAF's poor fundraising capability, and even their demand to increase self-raised funds, clearly disregards the law and further exposes their ignorance of legal aid.

In the United States, one of the reasons pro bono lawyers are prevalent is that the Model Rules of Professional Conduct formulated by the American Bar Association (ABA) explicitly stipulate that every lawyer "should" provide at least 50 hours of pro bono legal services annually, and New York State took the lead last year in setting these 50 hours as a review condition for attorneys wishing to register to practice in the state. However, looking at our country's "Attorneys' Ethics Code," it only makes a generalized moral declaration: "Lawyers shall participate in legal aid, legal services for ordinary people, or engage in other social public interest activities to universalize legal services." Yet, there are no clear regulations on how lawyers should participate or how many hours they should dedicate each year, rendering the provision a dead letter.

No wonder the LAF currently faces the awkward scene criticized by the aforementioned lawmakers: "wealthy" lawyers are unwilling to donate to the LAF, "uncompetitive" lawyers in the market treat the LAF as an ATM, and "novice" lawyers treat the LAF as a lawyer-training bootcamp. Because even these lawyers, who ought to bear the greatest sense of mission and public-interest dedication toward legal aid, view the state-budget-funded LAF merely as a "gold-mining vault," how can one still expect lawyers to sincerely, voluntarily, and selflessly "dedicate their time" and "dedicate their passion" to the legal aid enterprise?

Budget Frozen Due to Ineffective Fundraising

After all, while covering the necessary expenses of legal aid is an inescapable obligation of the state, what truly makes legal aid effective and allows disadvantaged people to genuinely enjoy the right to litigation and the right to equality guaranteed by the Constitution are only "lawyers" who possess professional qualifications in legal aid and are enthusiastically dedicated. Therefore, when an LAF born with the vow to assist disadvantaged citizens has its budget frozen by law-ignoring lawmakers because it does not raise its own funds, and is treated as a gold-mining vault by public-interest-forgetting lawyers, this LAF is destined to fail to even help itself; whom else can it be expected to help?