Constitutional Litigation Reform

From the "Council of Grand Justices" to the "Constitutional Court"

Before 2022, constitutional litigation in Taiwan took the form of interpretations issued by the Council of Grand Justices. In principle, only abstract legal norms—such as statutes, administrative regulations, and judicial precedents—could be reviewed, so individuals could not bring constitutional challenges against court judgments in their own cases that they believed to be unconstitutional. JRF long advocated introducing Germany's system of constitutional review of court judgments, a reform that was ultimately adopted under the current system.

Since the new constitutional litigation system took effect, the transparency and openness of the review process have improved significantly. For every case the Constitutional Court accepts, the full petition and the legal opinions of the relevant agencies and institutions are made public. The drawback, however, is that petitions are not published for the overwhelming majority of cases, which are not accepted for review. And because the Constitutional Court has limited staff, its rulings declining to hear a case almost never give specific reasons. As a result, the standards the Court uses to decide whether to accept a case remain murky to outside observers.

To address this problem, JRF wrote to the Judicial Yuan in 2021, recommending that petitions in cases not accepted for review also be made public. This would let the public see whether the Grand Justices declined a case because the petition's arguments were not clear enough (as in the boilerplate phrase found in almost every such ruling: "failed to specifically state the reasons"), or whether the petition was already thoroughly reasoned and the Grand Justices simply concluded after deliberation that there was no need to hear it. The Judicial Yuan responded that Article 18 of the Constitutional Court Procedure Act specifies the circumstances in which documents are to be made public, and that these do not include cases not accepted for review; there is therefore no legal basis for publishing them.

We believe that publishing the petitions in cases not accepted for review would help future petitioners assess their chances of obtaining relief through constitutional litigation and would clarify the Constitutional Court's standards for accepting cases, without adding to the Grand Justices' workload. JRF will therefore continue to push for, and study, legislative amendments to bring about this change.

So that the Constitution can truly protect the fundamental rights of everyone in Taiwan, JRF will continue to propose recommendations, from the perspective of ordinary people, for reforming and improving the constitutional litigation system.

Since 2025: The Constitutional Court in Crisis

An amendment to the Constitutional Court Procedure Act, passed jointly by the opposition parties, took effect on January 25, 2025. The amended law requires at least 10 Grand Justices to take part in deliberations on the merits. However, the terms of 7 Grand Justices expired on October 31, 2024, and the Legislative Yuan has yet to confirm their successors. As a result, the Constitutional Court has been unable to issue rulings on the merits under the amended Act and had been paralyzed for nearly a year at the time of writing. After the Legislative Yuan rejected the entire slate of Grand Justice nominees for the second time on July 25, 2025, the deadlock remained unresolved.

The Constitutional Court's continued inability to rule on the merits has eroded the public's right to petition for constitutional review of laws that may be unconstitutional, with more than 400 cases stalled before the Court. The Civil Alliance for Monitoring Grand Justice Nominations has brought civil society groups together to repeatedly urge the Constitutional Court to accept the case challenging the constitutionality of the amendment to the Constitutional Court Procedure Act. The Alliance has also called on the President to "make the vetting and nomination process more transparent and participatory in order to win broader public support," and on the Legislative Yuan to "review nominees rationally and not sacrifice the Grand Justices to partisan battles." It has further reiterated that, in the vetting and nomination process, the Presidential Office should expand the vetting panel to include more diverse representatives and explain its reasons for each nomination more proactively and in greater detail in order to win broader public support. At the same time, every party caucus in the Legislative Yuan should allow its legislators a free vote and carefully examine each nominee's integrity, commitment to constitutionalism and human rights, and legal knowledge and expertise. The Legislative Yuan must not repeat past mistakes and allow the people's constitutional rights to remain hostage to party interests.