For more than two decades, there have been calls from the public and private sectors in Taiwan for the establishment of an agency responsible exclusively for fighting government corruption. Over the years, the legislative and executive branches of the central government had made various proposals and even taken some initial steps to promote the formation of a specialized anti-corruption agency, but little concrete progress was made. In the middle of this year, however, a series of high-profile events occurred that spurred the government to action. In the first, an investigation of a shooting that occurred in late May revealed possible connections between several police officials in Taichung City, central Taiwan, and organized crime. Then in mid-July, three Taiwan High Court judges were charged with accepting bribes in exchange for rendering favorable verdicts. As of mid-October, the judges were still being investigated, but the public outcry over their alleged corruption led to the resignation of the Judicial Yuan’s president and vice president shortly after the charges were filed.
In response to the growing public concern, President Ma Ying-jeou announced at a media conference on July 20 this year that a new agency dedicated to fighting corruption would be formed under the Ministry of Justice (MOJ). “The government absolutely must take effective measures to prevent and punish corruption if it is to fulfill its responsibility to the public,” he said. “Public servants need to understand that legal and ethical requirements cannot be violated or trampled upon. We will not permit a small number of corrupt officials to sully the reputation of all public servants.”
Pending the Legislative Yuan’s approval of its organizational structure, the new agency is slated to begin operating by 2012, but President Ma has called on the ruling party and the MOJ to speed up the process as much as possible. When the new agency begins operating, prosecutors from existing prosecutors’ offices will be based at the new agency’s regional offices in northern, central and southern Taiwan to lead investigations.
President Ma noted that the establishment of the anti-corruption agency would meet two major goals, among others. On the one hand, it would satisfy public expectations, as more than 70 percent of the respondents in recent opinion polls said that Taiwan needed such an agency, the president said, while on the other it would help Taiwan match global trends. In 2003, the United Nations Convention against Corruption was adopted by the UN General Assembly and entered into force in December 2005. Among other things, the convention calls on each state to form or maintain a body or bodies to prevent or combat official corruption, allow them to operate independently without undue outside influence, and give them adequate material resources and properly trained personnel to accomplish their mission.
Unlike similar agencies in Singapore and Hong Kong, which report directly to the prime minister in Singapore or to the chief executive in Hong Kong, the proposed anti-corruption administration in Taiwan will work under the MOJ. President Ma said at a media conference that the decision to follow a different path than Singapore and Hong Kong was made because Taiwan’s legal system operates under different fundamental legal principles. Whereas Hong Kong and Singapore use the common law system that relies on judicial police to investigate crimes, Taiwan uses the civil law system, under which prosecutors are empowered to lead investigations. The president is intimately familiar with the details of the local legal system, having trained as a lawyer and served as the Republic of China’s minister of justice from 1993 to 1996.
Chiang Hui-ming, the MOJ’s administrative vice minister, explains that if the anti-corruption agency were to report directly to the premier or president, its investigators would have a higher rank than prosecutors in the MOJ system, with the result that the prosecutors’ authority as the leading investigative force would be undermined. Chiang, who formerly served as director of the MOJ’s Department of Prosecutorial Affairs, believes that as long as prosecutors are given the freedom to work independently, it is more workable and effective to put the anti-corruption agency under the MOJ. The vice minister says that investigative efforts will proceed without any interference from high-ranking officials, including the minister of justice, as prosecutors are supervised and regulated only by the prosecutorial system. That system’s top official, the prosecutor-general of the Supreme Prosecutors Office, is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Legislative Yuan to serve a four-year term.
Chiang believes that prosecutors will not only have full investigative independence under the new specialized agency, but will also be able to perform corruption investigations in a much more efficient and precise way than before. “It will significantly change the current environment for investigating corruption cases,” Chiang says, adding that he believes cases will be reported earlier and more useful evidence will be located and examined, among other improvements. That would help improve the current conviction rate for corruption cases, as only about 60 percent of all prosecuted corruption cases ultimately result in guilty sentences, far below the more than 90 percent conviction rate for all prosecuted criminal cases in Taiwan, according to the MOJ.
President Ma Ying-jeou announces in July this year that a new agency will be formed exclusively for fighting corruption. (Photo by Central News Agency)
One reason the new agency is expected to be more efficient at uncovering and prosecuting corruption is that it will gather dispersed resources under one roof. Currently, anti-corruption efforts are carried out by personnel belonging to various agencies. The MOJ’s agencies include the Department of Government Employee Ethics, the Department of Prosecutorial Affairs and the Investigation Bureau. The Judicial Yuan and the military also have dedicated anti-corruption units. The new agency will recruit personnel mostly from the MOJ’s Investigation Bureau, police departments and ethics departments in the central and local governments. These so-called “anti-corruption officials” will be authorized to perform investigations under the direction of prosecutors.
Meanwhile, Chiang says that the more than 1,000 government ethics staffers around Taiwan will continue to work on preventing corruption. One part of that ongoing effort is the establishment of comprehensive standard operating procedures so that, for example, there are fewer irregularities in purchase agreements. “They are important assistants to high-ranking government officials,” Chiang says of the ethics staffers. “They keep alert to potential irregularities in their organizations and help prevent them from happening.” In this sense, the new agency, which will integrate the work of preventing, investigating and prosecuting corruption, is to a considerable degree reinforcing and coordinating the existing work done by government ethics officials.
The new agency will also include a pioneering taskforce previously unseen in any of Taiwan’s judicial investigation branches, according to Vice Minister Chiang. A committee of 11 to 15 scholars and specialists with expertise in such fields as engineering, finance and law will be formed to examine suspected corruption cases that prosecutors have shelved for various reasons. “If warranted, the committee could direct that certain cases be picked up again and reenter the investigative process,” Chiang says.
Although the committee has yet to be formed, legal experts are already weighing in on its merits. Wu Jing-jin, an assistant professor in the Department of Financial and Economic Law at Aletheia University in Taipei, says that it will be crucial to select committee members with high ethical standards. The supervisory taskforce can only build its credibility, Wu says, by selecting members who can make truly independent judgments in cases with political overtones.
As for the new agency as a whole, Wu also expresses concerns that its work could overlap with that of other corruption-fighting government offices. While all the responsible agencies are expected to work together, Wu points out they could end up battling each other for supremacy. “It’s just like the police or investigators from different agencies, who sometimes fight for the credit of settling a drug-dealing case,” he says. Wu also notes that the MOJ’s Investigation Bureau became very powerful during the martial law era, which ended in 1987, because it sometimes carried out investigations of political cases at the behest of top government officials. This enduring legacy of power, the academic says, could mean that the new corruption-fighting agency ends up with an uncertain, ambiguous status at the MOJ.
Although the formation of the new agency is assured, Wu argues that existing anti-corruption efforts could have been adequately improved by strengthening agencies like the Investigation Bureau and the Special Investigation Division under the Supreme Prosecutors Office, which is composed of six to 15 prosecutors responsible for cases involving higher-ranking government officials. This view is echoed by Lee Mau-sheng, a professor in the College of Law at National Taiwan University and a board member of the Judicial Reform Foundation, a group of lawyers, judges and scholars established in 1997 with the goal of improving Taiwan’s legal system. “Some officials have been suspected of corruption for a long time, but have remained untouched,” he says. “It’s hard to say whether that has happened because prosecuting them could be seen as a threat to the functioning of the government or because investigators just found their cases too difficult to prosecute. It’s also hard to say whether that situation would improve under the new agency.”
Lee believes that in order to truly eliminate corruption, it is essential for judges, prosecutors and investigators to build confidence in their own abilities and in their work’s contribution to society. “All government staff should receive adequate ethics and professional skills training, and they should also be given the tools and resources necessary to build confidence and self-respect regarding the work they do,” he says. The best way to fight corruption, Lee says, is to give all public servants the training and feedback they need so that all government offices continue developing a culture based on honesty and integrity.
Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com