Rules created by the government. Better?
Are you done?
Can’t just write three letters for my poor thumbs?
The rule wasn’t created by the government. It was created by some individuals within government who do not normally have the power of lawmaking, and society has just gone along with it instead of saying “hang on a sec…”.
But I guess it’s close enough. Carry on.
Oh my god…
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Except for the nothing better to do part, yes.
(For my human suit, obviously.)
At the risk of both stating the obvious and being repetitive, individuals within the government are the government in the sense that they act on behalf of the government. It’s like when a law defines employer as the employer per se and the employee’s manager and any other authorized representative of the employer.
They don’t just make up rules randomly. They’re authorized by law to make rules. That authorization does not give them infinite power but does not give them infinitely limited power either. It’s always a balancing act.
Have you sued the government yet (in Taiwan) over this stuff? Is there a suit pending? If you’re really convinced certain bureaucrats are exceeding their authority, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is.
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Am I the only one who finds it really wrong that bars can’t open even though we’ve had 10 straight days of zero cases? If I was a bar owner, I’d be livid.
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Maybe the Government is getting some practice for their next attack - on Booze related deaths. Stop the supply would be one of their priorities.
Bars are open, I am a drinker.
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Oh. The thing the other poster put up said they’re still to remain shut? I dunno. 
The watering holes near my uni seem to be open, and have been for a while.
Guy
What’s the point in suing a government that has knowingly and deliberately discarded rule of Law? While there has been some success in other countries, you are surely aware that suing a government is not cheap. If anyone here wants to help me raise a billion NT$ I would be happy to put in the time to construct a case.
The mere fact of someone being “within the government” doesn’t give them the power to make laws. Ordinarily, certain people must be involved, and certain procedures must be followed. Chen at al are not authorized to rule by fiat - their powers are theoretically limited to the minimum necessary to protect public health. There is no statute that mentions masks. Unfortunately, the emergency legislation, as written, is so vague that it theoretically allows random people to pull any rule they like out of their ass, but since that is not compatible either with the Constitution, the basic principles of democracy, or even common sense, any reasonable court would fall back on primary legislation to interpret the limits of its intent. Masks and shutdowns, for example, would be subjected to tests of proportionality and reasonableness (ie., do they work?).
In general, I don’t think the courts are likely to be reasonable in 2021, not in Taiwan, nor anywhere else. Judges and lawyers are not trained in science and would have absolutely no clue how to apply the required tests anyway. So we’re in a situation where the law is not just broken, but unfixable. It doesn’t help when people proclaim online that “its the Law!” when it probably isn’t, and the proposition that if some subset of the population find workarounds for some stupid rule then TPTB will punish the collective with even more stupid rules contains some worrying axioms.
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So your suggestion is that it would have to be the Legislative Yuan to change the COVID alert levels every time and they also would need to pass a new law every time the measures are to be adjusted slightly?
Or who - in your opinion - could legally enact a mask mandate in Taiwan?
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I saw some bars open in Xinyi weeks ago, and went to a board game bar last week
My point is that the onus should NOT be on the general public to prove, in the courts, that the government is acting in bad faith. The get-out clause in the Constitution (overriding the declared rights on the case of a national emergency) should not be treated as an excuse to just play sillybuggers with stuff that somebody thinks, without any evidence at all, might do more good than harm. There should be some sort of public review of the evidence, and there should be an attempt to achieve a democratic consensus (perhaps via plebiscite). In whatever manner, it should be the aim of the government to monitor, debate, and constrain whatever the CDC proposes. This just isn’t happening.
A law that says the CDC can do anything they want to, without any justification to the public, and without any specified process of approval, is a useless and meaningless law. It’s a fairly fundamental principle of law that no statute can override the mechanisms on which laws are predicated. It makes a mockery of the whole thing.
As for mask mandates specifically: I’m suggesting that if proper tests were applied to such proposals, they’d fall at the first hurdle.
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Can’t believe they’re still not reopening audio-video barber shops!
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2021 is indeed a year full of surprises.
Guy
Hardly any of them good.
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Administrative Litigation Act Art. 98 Par. 2:
起訴，按件徵收裁判費新臺幣四千元。適用簡易訴訟程序之事件，徵收裁判費新臺幣二千元。
In initiating a litigation, court costs of NTD 4,000 shall be collected per case. In matters that shall be subject to the procedure of summary proceedings, court costs of NTD 2,000 shall be collected.
And lawyers start at, what, 30k per case?
Of course not. Bureaucrats don’t make laws in the narrow sense. They make rules (regulations, procedures, standards…), as provided for in laws. Which is what I just said a few posts ago.
You would probably be shocked if you sat down and tried to untangle the web of policies, standards, directives, and other random-sounding crap authorized by one totally-obscure-to-the-general-public law in Canada. It’s amazing if you don’t expect it, but it’s actually how the state functions and has functioned for a very long time. And like I said, that doesn’t give the state unlimited power, but you can’t say just because something was decided by a bureaucrat it’s automatically null and void. If that were so, no modern, developed state would function.
As a general rule, you don’t need a law that mentions citrus if you have a law that mentions fruit.
Ideally the question should be do they work?, but practically speaking is there a reasonable expectation for them to sorta kinda work? is easier. 
To quote the letter of the law, any restriction on a constitutional right must be to prevent infringement upon the freedoms of other persons, to avert an imminent crisis, to maintain social order or to advance public welfare (為防止妨礙他人自由、避免緊急危難、維持社會秩序，或增進公共利益所必要). The task here is to prove that a restriction fails to meet the criteria. There are organizations undertaking to do the equivalent for various covid measures in other jurisdictions. Is there no such group in Taiwan you can join?
They already have been reasonable in some places. Then again, one person’s reasonable is another’s tyrannical… but you know about some of the cases in England for example.
They wouldn’t (generally) know how to apply the scientific or economic tests, because they’re not supposed to. They do, at least at the higher levels, know how to apply the legal tests, because that’s their job.
Haven’t we been over that one a million times? 
Well, most people coming here looking for information are looking for practical information they can apply in their daily lives in Taiwan, for now and the near future, not after some big showdown at the Supreme Administrative Court. If you encourage this bunch of mostly foreigners to argue with the enforcers every step of the way about constitutional rights as understood in the context of 三民主義 and so on… how useful is that? 
Like I said, if you have a case, go for it. 
But do keep in mind this is the Ghost Isle, not the Sceptred Isle.
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I’m not encouraging people to stand in front of the tanks and cry freedom - my point above was somewhat narrower than that, as I tried to explain. The other stuff was just filling in details.
I understand that laws can be used to provide for the existence of “rules”. I work with such things all the time. However, for obvious reasons, those laws are (usually) carefully crafted to put constraints on the rules; in particular, they often define what the ultimate intent of the rules should be, thereby providing the basis for a legal test. Sometimes there are auxiliary laws that pin down how the primary legislation should be implemented. Laws that permit state agents to make up rules overriding basic constitutional rights ought to be constructed very carefully indeed.
Regarding the cost of legal action: I assume you’re referring to an uncomplicated civil case. Here we’re talking about challenging the constitutionality of the emergency legislation, or possibly the legality of the “rules” themselves (I think the latter would have a much lower chance if success). What would be the equivalent of a judicial review in Taiwan? It seems that one can file something of this sort directly to the judicial yuan?