A Study on Good Governance of the Judicial Power in Taiwan, Republic of China--Focus on Court Governance

• Main Authors: Lin, Chi-Hui, 林吉輝
• Other Authors: Chou, Yang-Shan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12846107763475640569

博士 === 中國文化大學 === 中山學術研究所 === 98 === Abstract Legislation and Administration of a democratic country are commonly elected by the people. It is in accordance with democratic legitimacy and accountability. Meanwhile, the judiciary is not directly subject to be watched by the people under judicial independence. Even people complain about court prolong process and backlogs, they have no choice to step into the court due to judicial functionary expanding. Judicial independence has been gradually become as a judicial tyrant. Thus those countries under rule of law all endeavor to court governance to improve speedy trial. Traditionally, “judicial accountability” is indirectly checked from judges’ function to enhance accountability and provide legitimacy for the judicial power while avoided to injure judicial independence. Modern judicial accountability requires court process opening to the pubic. Specifically, it must in accordance with sociality which is also called “social accountability”. With interpretation of the Constitution in Taiwan, it seems to provide a speedy trial right for the people such as the States. Also the Legislation has just passed a “Criminal Speedy Trial Law” in April. However the court is deficient in efficiency which is not concerned by judicial reform project. A case management system, which can be used as a form of control instrument over the court, has been solid proved that it can provide a transparent process, efficiency and accountability. It has been considered as the core of a court governance reform in Anglo-American legal system. It has been also proved that a deliberatively designed and practiced well case management system could be expected to achieve the ends of efficiency and quality in the mean time. Since an efficient case management system is established on both due process of law and equal protection of law, it represents a broad meaning of quality. Both quality and speedy trial are equal importance to the people. Judges are with no power to sacrifice timely justice for the reason of quality. It is also unaccepted that judges use judicial independence to refuse speedy trial. The only legitimacy of judicial independence is founded on accountability. For the end of using rare resources to improve efficiency, court governance reform needs to find a mechanism of case management instead of increasing judge manpower. However the major task of the court governance is to well manage the case flow. It is court’s accountability to reduce backlogs and delay for ensuring timely justice on every individual case. While the court has the consentience, judges and the staffs thereafter can co-operate each other. Since involved in the court process from the beginning to the end through a case management system, people then can highly trust to the court. Using good governance conception to review on the past reform, we can find a deficient in improving court governance. For expanding judicial reform in the future, using conception of transparency, efficiency, and accountability of good governance is needed. Still, several issues can be found that is administrative power still influencing on the judges select, judges impeached seldom being withdrawn from their judgeship, court’s decisions still influenced by the Congress and political party, the issue of rule of law in Taiwan existing on legal culture, and judge self-governance control mechanism still being not well established. The above issues still need to be resolved in the future.