A Tiger without Teeth?The Influence on Criminal Investigation after Wiretapping has to be Authorized by a Court

• Main Authors: LIN , JENG-JIANN, 林鄭健
• Other Authors: SHEU, CHUEN-JIM
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54383243474157724874

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 犯罪學研究所 === 103 === Since the administration of Communication Protection and Interception Act on December 11, 2007, a communications surveillance warrant needed in the investigation was changed to be authorized by a judge. The shift has made the concept of human rights protection to be realized, but it also made a impact to the practical operation of the investigation, resulting in the definite fact that the approval rate of communications surveillance has also dropped in a large scale. This double-edged weapon protects human rights in one hand, but also restricts the constraints the investigators on the whole system, which is an inevitable result of the administration according to law by states ruled of law. The Legislative Yuan passed the proposed amendments to the "Com-munication Protection and Interception Act" on January 14, 2014, which is more strict on the conditions and procedures for applying a communica-tions surveillance warrant. Even though the protection of human rights gets more comprehensive, but the content of amendments makes it more difficult in the practical implementation, or even harms the rights and in-terests of the party concerned as well as the social order. The law en-forcement officers may feel confused and disoriented. The changes of the criminal policy on communications surveillance conducted by the legisla-ture has caused the tilt of the justice scales and aroused many arguments. According to the statistics gathered by Supreme Prosecutors Office, among the wiretapping cases approved by the Court from April 1 to Sep-tember 30 in 2013, 61.8% of which are narcotics and 12.38% relates to the corruption. The cases of these two categories account for 74.18%. Giving that the Investigation Bureau has always been Taiwan’s major law en-forcement agency to investigate the drug and corruption cases, this study adopted the in-depth interview, selecting 4 senior prosecutors and 8 senior special agents throughout the country, gathering their in-depth cognition, predicament and suggestions about the returning of the monitoring rights back to the Court. The study found the respondents consider that there are five kinds of resistance while conducting the wiretapping, including the over-strict law requirements, the complicated application procedures, the lack of investi-gative thinking of judges, the different standards of judges, and the limi-tation on the number of approved lines. After the returning of the wire-tapping rights back to the Court, it has been realized in eliminating the excessive monitoring, ensuring human rights protection and strictly ob-serving the procedural justice, as if the decayed teeth of a tiger has already be uprooted. But on the contrast, there are negative impacts resulted by the limited communication records retrieval, the compressed investigation energy, the violated principle of equity, and the passive investigative lazi-ness, which can be described as the mistaken removal of good teeth from instead bad ones from a tiger. I hereby proposed my suggest direction for the communications sur-veillance system reform in the three aspects of law, enforcement and edu-cation, with a mind to find a balance between human rights protection and major cases investigation.