Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: TPP/Facebook
IN AN UNUSUAL legislative proposal, the TPP has proposed that legal proceedings be livestreamed in the future. The proposal has since been pushed through the legislature by the TPP and KMT.
Unsurprisingly, this proposal met with opposition from lawyers’ organizations such as the Judicial Reform Foundation and 16 other civil society groups representing the legal profession. These groups have instead proposed allowing for livestreaming of only cases involving significant public interest. To this extent, privacy protections for witnesses, experts, and others was also called for. Such groups also proposed that before any implementation of livestreaming of cases, a study should be conducted into the possible impact of such livestreaming, and that a trial period be implemented first before any livestreaming is rolled out.
Indeed, the Taiwan Medical Association and Taiwan Society of Forensic Medicine previously issued a joint statement pointing to that expert witnesses may feel public pressure about their testimony if this is livestreamed in a manner that is hypothetically viewable by anyone, which may cause them to change testimony or avoid discussing controversial issues. Such expert witnesses could be prone to doxxing or other forms of harassment with the proposal. The Taiwan Criminal Law Society has also stated that privacy rights, particularly impacting marginalized groups, could be violated through livestreaming.
In this sense, the TPP has been criticized for rushing through a hastily drawn-up legal proposal, despite the significant impact this would have. Proposing as wide-ranging a series of changes to how trials are conducted in Taiwan, with no public discussion of the issue ahead of time, and with no demand for livestreamed trials from the public is highly unusual for a country that has faltered when it comes to even introducing a jury system. After many stops and starts, a “lay judge” system involving regular citizens making judgments alongside trained professional judges is currently implemented on a trial basis. Still, one notes that legal experts do not oppose livestreaming parts of trial procedures, and that the proposal does not always call for livestreaming all of trials, even if political opponents are likely to frame it as such.
But the TPP under party chair Huang Kuo-chang, formerly a legal scholar at Academia Sinica, would seem to be grasping for means to attack the Lai administration with the proposal. In particular, the TPP has its eyes on livestreaming trial proceedings against party leader Ko Wen-je, who is currently detained by authorities and faces trial on corruption charges related to the Core Pacific Mall. Ko is accused of embezzlement in order to enlarge the size of the Core Pacific Mall to benefit its developers with extra floor space, as well as regarding that the TPP declared no campaign expenditures in the 2024 presidential election, something that no other major party did.
The attempt is to frame livestreaming trials as carrying on judicial reforms that the DPP has abandoned, in line with how the TPP and KMT have tried to frame moves in the past two years as judicial reform. Though judicial reform was historically a demand of the pan-Green camp, the TPP and KMT have framed moves aimed at enlarging the power of the Legislative Yuan–the only branch of government they control–by prying away powers from the executive and judiciary branches. Such actions include freezing the Constitutional Court, so as to prevent the Constitutional Court from making judgments against them. There is some evidence that the public seems to believe this narrative that such efforts to fundamentally alter the system of checks and balances that currently exist in Taiwan are, in fact, the same judicial reform that the DPP has advocated for.
The long-term future of the TPP remains in question. The TPP has increasingly become indistinguishable from the KMT except as a smaller pan-Blue party, having sided with the KMT in spite of significant public pushback against the KMT’s efforts to alter the design of Taiwan’s government system, as well as the KMT’s attempt to drastically cut the national budget.
It may not be surprising either to note that after this controversy, TPP chair Huang Kuo-chang later caused controversy for publicizing what seemed to be recordings from interrogations of TPP chair Ko Wen-je–except that questions were raised about the veracity of the recordings. Huang aimed to be aiming to drum up public outrage over the statements in the recordings. Nor did Huang, in fact, claim that they were actually recordings of Ko, stating that the recording was for “demonstration purposes.” This has led to an investigation as to whether Huang improperly obtained recordings of Ko being interrogated by prosecutors, that the recordings were illegally leaked by Ko’s defense lawyers, or if the recording may have been fabricated using AI. Indeed, it later transpired that the recording did not appear to be a real recording, but was a simulated example of questioning, leading to further criticisms against Huang.