As I understand the way US works, if a president commits a crime they can impeach him and get him out of office while the vice president takes over. Why doesn’t Taiwan have that? Wouldnt a bien flee once his term is over?
What is the argument in favor of having presidential immunity to criminal charges?
Why should any ROC president have such immunity? Seems a bit strange to me. But this is Taiwan.
[quote=“Mer”]What is the argument in favor of having presidential immunity to criminal charges?
Why should any ROC president have such immunity? Seems a bit strange to me. But this is Taiwan.[/quote]
So that prosecutors cannot harass the president with frivolous charges? Isn’t the US president immune to civil lawsuits while in office too? Or something like that?
me wishes Judge Dredd were here…
“I am the LAW!!!”
Where’s Sheriff Buford Pusser when you need him?
The ROC Constitution has mechanisms for both impeachment and recall elections. The problem with impeachment is that a president can only be impeached for a narrow group of crimes that are kind of like treason, rebellion, and this weirdo ROC crime of surrendering all or part of the territory of the ROC to foreign interest.
And even then the articles of impeachment have to be initiated by more than 50% of the Legislative Yuan and then the defendant-President has to be convicted by 2/3rds.
Ain’t going happen sports fans.
Recall elections face the same kind of uphill numbers battle. Although as a Californian who saw Gray Davis recalled and replaced by Arnold the Terminator-Governator a few years back, I should believe recalls can happen; as a Taiwanese taxpayer I have little hope.
An ROC recall election requires:
1/4 of Legislative Yuan to consider motion to place issue on ballot
2/3 of Legislative Yuan to approve that motion
then 50% of the eligible voters to make a valid election and
51% approving the recall (that maybe a wee bit confusing, what it means-I think-is if Taiwan had 100 eligible voters, 50 of them have to cast valid ballots, then 26 of those 50 have to vote recall to “diss and dismiss” the A-Bian creature.
And then------fucking Crazy Annette becomes President. Our choice is either a thief or a nut case.
Actually it sounds like American politics. (I did the absentee ballot thing a few weeks ago and thought, maybe the world was better off in the days of Kings and Queens, Dictators and Despots).
Take care,
Brian I
Deposed King in Exile
sdf
[quote=“brianlkennedy”]And then------fucking Crazy Annette becomes President. Our choice is either a thief or a nut case.
[/quote]
I’ll take the thief, thanks.
[quote=“michangel”][quote=“Mer”]What is the argument in favor of having presidential immunity to criminal charges?
Why should any ROC president have such immunity? Seems a bit strange to me. But this is Taiwan.[/quote]
“but this is taiwan”. have a little respect!
[/quote]
I meant Taiwan no disrespect. My apologies if my comment was taken as such.
[quote=“Mer”][quote=“michangel”][quote=“Mer”]What is the argument in favor of having presidential immunity to criminal charges?
Why should any ROC president have such immunity? Seems a bit strange to me. But this is Taiwan.[/quote]
“but this is taiwan”. have a little respect!
[/quote]
I meant Taiwan no disrespect. My apologies if my comment was taken as such.[/quote]
haha he was joking
Wouldn’t giving the mainland to the Chinese be surrendering the territory to foreign interest?
ROC never ratified any treaty to surrender the mainland.
Brian, did you not write long ago, when you were still a columnist for the TT (would that you still were), that Taiwan bases its immunity laws on the French system, which can trace its own immunity laws to the days of the revolution? In essence, is it not designed to one, as DB said, to avoid wasting time with frivolous charges, but also to give the opposition protection from trumped up charges (being an all too easy way to silence troublemakers - or truth-tellers)? I seem to recal all this and would like to think it has some bases in fact. 
Mucha Man,
since I know zero, zip, nada, about the French legal system it is unlikely that I mentioned it in any of my pieces for the Taipei Times back in their glory years so long ago.
As to why the ROC Constitution has the “no charge the Prez” clause, I would suspect that was to give some “dignity” to the office, plus in a political science theory sense you have some problems with seperation of powers and conflicts of interest if you have a system where prosecutors can directly charge those “above them”.
Rather than drift off into a scholar’s discussion of the theory let me mention two practical answers. In California the District Attorney’s office can not, by law, directly charge an elected official who is on the same or superior rank to the District Attorney. What the District Attorney must do, if they want to charge for example The Sheriff or The Mayor or The County Board of Supervisors (all of which are elected positions equal in “dignity” to the District Attorney) is present the evidence to the County Grand Jury and then the Grand Jury (i.e. “the people”) can make a decision to charge or not and what charges to bring.
The real reason for this is it is a conflict of interest. Let us say I am Brian the District Attorney of San Diego County and I think to myself, “fuck I would prefer being San Diego Mayor, that is money for nothing as Dire Straits used to sing” and I decide the way to do this is to “take the current Mayor out” via criminal charges and then next election just slide my own self into the now empty slot. Ergo, conflict of interest. So by the California Constitution, must go through Grand Jury.
On the Federal side, the position of the U.S. Attorney General’s Office (as presented in a “white paper” they did a few years ago) is that a sitting US President is immune from criminal charging. As an attorney and criminal law “scholar” I disagree with their analysis. Sitting US Presidents can be subject to other forms of legal proceeding, why not criminal charges? In fact no prosecutor has ever “tried his luck” charging a sitting US President so we have no idea what would really happen.
Okay then, that is that,
take care,
Brian
What about charging a possible electable mayor of something just to get you in the office (no matter what position). Seems to work in Taipei County, btw.