How do I find Taiwanese court cases and their rulings? Is there a web site or do I have to visit the court itself with certain information?
Background: there seems to be past legal case involving my home’s previous house owner and a bank. I am interested in what that case was and the outcome. Maybe a needle in a haystack, but who knows, maybe not.
A few years ago, the poster @olm also wrote some instructions for using the Judicial Yuan case search function. The instructions are here:
Forumosa migrated to Discourse software from a board that used phpbb software. I don’t know anything about coding, but somehow a small but important part of @olm’s post got deleted in the migration. olm’s paragraph numbered “1)” should read like this:
The first url that @olm mentions above, http://jirs.judicial.gov.tw/FJUD/FJUDQRY01_1.aspx, should (I hope) allow you to use Google Translate by right-clicking the page and then left-clicking “Translate to English” if you have a Chrome browser. Unless my memory is deceiving me, I think right-clicking might also work now on Internet Explorer (I think you may get a Bing translation instead of Google Translate), and I think there’s an app you can get for Firefox that will allow you to right-click for Google Translate.
@olm also gives a list of English translations for various items you may read on that webpage.
Here’s @olm’s instructional post on the earlier phpbb bulletin board, which is still accessible at the time of the writing of this post:
I do read Chinese, but searching the site is a bit too complicated for me. I’ll take a look at it again tonight with my wife. With the right search terms we might get somewhere.
Yep, that’s the site, but actually you can just write http://jirs.judicial.gov.tw (easy to remember because JIRS = judicial information retrieval system), and while “normal” cases can be found under 裁判書查詢, others are hidden in the other categories you can see at the top.
If you’re searching for a name, you don’t need to enter the date etc. because you can just put it in the “full text” field. The problem is that a name (of a person or a business) can be censored in the online version of a decision, and so can an address. It may be censored in one decision, uncensored in another.
Expect typos when Roman letters are involved (whether names or anything else), and expect inconsistency when foreign names are involved (e.g. last-first-middle, first-middle-last, just last…).
The good news is the update to the system a few months ago: you can select all the courts (or units) available on a page instead of selecting one at a time. This will give you a frame on the left with a link to click for each court/unit that has at least one result for the information you entered.
If you don’t find what you’re looking for (or if you do but want more), you can try looking up 訴願 decisions at www.ey.gov.tw (just administrative decisions, not judicial), the same thing at some local government websites, and the same thing (but just “control”, not administrative or judicial) at www.cy.gov.tw. Again, names can be censored, so the more information you have to start with, the better.
If you need a translation, there are certainly experienced translators who can be found through Forumosa. I’m one of the less experienced ones, but fwiw I actually enjoy legalese.
Thanks everyone. It took a couple of hours, but then we found what we wanted.
@yyy luckily the names in the case we were looking for were not censored and luckily the sites help windows are really helpful, so we also found out that you can select all courts by holding down the shift key or use CTRL-A.
With what we found we can take a next step and it saved me a lot of time and effort, so thanks again.
This being a Taiwanese government website, it might be a temporary problem, but they might be discriminating against my unconventional IP address. Can anyone else connect?
law.judicial.gov.tw normally uses encryption to protect your information. When Chromium tried to connect to law.judicial.gov.tw this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. This may happen when an attacker is trying to pretend to be law.judicial.gov.tw, or a Wi-Fi sign-in screen has interrupted the connection. Your information is still secure because Chromium stopped the connection before any data was exchanged.
You cannot visit law.judicial.gov.tw right now because the website sent scrambled credentials that Chromium cannot process. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
You can select the civil 民事, criminal 刑事, administrative 行政, and disciplinary 公懲 streams simultaneously. The frequently used citations menu is only available when you select one stream at a time.
Cases dropped by prosecutors before the first conclusion of court hearing and argument are the same with unprosecuted cases, so not in the database. Iiuc.