August 19, 2020
Hundreds of people gathered in front of the Liberty Square on August 16 holding up posters of 3 people wanted: the prosecutor Hou Kuan-ren, who investigated the Zhou Ren-shen case and Tai Ji Men case in 1996; Director Lin Qing-zong and Deputy Director Chen Ying-jin of the Administrative Enforcement Agency. The people were accusing the Prosecutor who processed the case based on “a trace of shadow flashed in the eye” and stole 24 years from them. This is 21st century! It is unbelievable to hear that a prosecutor made a fake case using his imagination which caused recurring fake tax bills. The three of them joined forces across the centuries to persecute the people, forcing auctions upon Tai Ji Men’s property. For more than a month, many non-governmental organizations such as the Rectifying 1219 Coalition, the Legal Tax Reform Coalition, and Tai Ji Men Dizi protested in front of the Administrative Enforcement Agency of the Ministry of Justice, yet did not get the Director and the Deputy Director’s attention. Auctioning off people’s property illegally and forcibly is no different than a robbery! The tactics used for persecution are just like the ones used during the time of martial law, which makes Taiwan's democracy and rule of law go backwards and imposes dishonest names upon Taiwan.
Taiwan is in urgent need of anti-fake reform;
Tai Ji Men is purged with 3 waves of persecutions
Chen Zhi-long, Chairman of Taiwan Association for Financial Criminal Law Study and former professor of the Department of Law in National Taiwan University, is an authority on Taiwan's criminal law and evidence law. He hopes to launch an "anti-fake" campaign to remove false dialectics from Taiwan's justice and politics and return to the true scientific evidence, so that Taiwan will no longer have unjust, wrong, and fake cases.
Chen Zhi-long took the Tai Ji Men case as an example for in-depth analysis. The Tai Ji Men fake case is neither a criminal case nor a tax case. Instead, it is an organized purge against Tai Ji Men. The persecution came in series of 3 waves: First, Prosecutor Hou Kuan-ren fabricated the indictment without any evidence in 1996, and ordered to cut off water and electricity to various Tai Ji Men academies. Second, Tai Ji Men was judicially bullied during the administrative remedy process. The judge of the Criminal Court stated that the evidence was fake. However, when the same case was going through trials in the Administrative Court in 2005 and 2006, Judge Huang Shu-ling who was assigned to judge in both Taichung High Administrative Court and the Supreme Administrative Court ignored the ruling of the Criminal Court and abused the people’s right to litigation. Third, the Taxation Bureau conducted an investigation on the nature of Red Envelops and arbitrarily determined only one half of the returned declarations were gifts and the other half were tuition, while all 7,401 returned surveys all declared the Red Envelopes were gifts! The false identification of the people’s declarations is an act of forging evidence! It was very clear that everyone declared gift, yet the NTB changed half of them to tuition, reasonably everyone can press charges against the NTB.
Chen emphasized that judges’ failure to abide by the Criminal Procedure Code of not participating to avoid bias as well as prosecutors’ secondment by the Administrative Enforcement Agency are harmful to fair trials and the rule of law in Taiwan.
The most absurd prosecution in history; Tai Ji Men received national compensation for wrongful detention.
After Taiwan's first direct presidential election in 1996, religious crackdowns were set off which implicated innocent Tai Ji Men. Both Kaohsiung and Hsinchu District Prosecutor's Offices received false reports against TJM at the same time. On December 19 of the same year, Prosecutor Hou Kuan-ren violated the Principle of Guarantee Against Double Jeopardy and proceeded with large-scale searches in various Tai Ji Men facilities.
On the night of the search on December 19, the Zhang-men-ren of TJM was still under investigation, the CTV Evening News was already broadcasting about the search. The next day, many newspaper headlines showed false reports that Tai Ji Men was suspected of fraudulently swindling 3.1 billion yuan and evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. Fraud? Tax evasion? 3.1 billion yuan? Who was making fake stories and releasing fake news? In fact, the Zhang-men-ren, while still under investigation, had merely over 610,000 yuan in his bank account at the time. It was as if the script of the play had already been plotted in advance, the prosecutor acted as judge and determined the verdict without investigating. He even released detailed information directly to the media, trying to discredit and stigmatize Tai Ji Men.
Hou Kuan-ren constantly violated the due process of law by releasing fake information to the media during on-going investigations, resulting in more than 400 serialized false reports (averagely 3-4 per day during the investigation) and more than 70 broadcasts by 12 TV stations. There are 117 days in total between the 2nd day after Hou Kuan-ren detained the Zhang-men-ren and the day the indictment was released. During that period of time, the Zhang-men-ren was only granted 29 minutes in total for 3 courts of investigations where the interrogation only allowed him to say 13 sentences.
It took ten years and three months and finally in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled TJM not guilty of tax evasion. And reasonably the NTB should have revoked all illegal tax bills. The Supreme Court made the determination after all evidence rigorously tried, 58 courts held during the first, second, and third trials of the Criminal Court, which took about 9,570 minutes with an average of 165 minutes per court. The Zhang-men-ren and dizi also received national compensation in 2009 for false detention. Given the afore mentioned facts, it shows how Hou Kuan-ren abused his authority and proceeded with the case recklessly. It also proves that Tai Ji Men was deliberately framed since the beginning and the entire case was an organized purge case. Unexpectedly, the NTB never gave up Hou Kuan-ren's indictment, which puzzled the entire legal circles.
Unlimited abuse of authority; Indictment based on an expression in the eye; A version of martial-law purge to exterminate the organization
In 2010, a video of Hou Kuan-ren's TV interview was presented in the Legislative Yuan. When asked how the defendant was found guilty, Hou publicly admitted, "I saw a trace in his eyes... a trace of shadow flashed." The current Control Yuan committee, the then legislator, Tian Qiu-jin commented in front of Minister of Justice Zeng Yong-fu, "If a prosecutor decides whether to prosecute a person merely by an eye expression, Taiwan will never have peace."
Hou Kuan-ren prosecuted the Zhang-men-ren on April 15, 1997. Soon as the indictment was released to the media on April 16, the absurd content was strongly criticized by the judiciary circles and the public. It was until the morning of April 17, Hou Kuan-ren directed investigators to search for evidence in the Tai Ji Men facilities. He confiscated a peach wood sword that he found in a Tai Ji Men academy and publicly stated that he would take it to the court as an exhibit of evidence. The first interrogation upon the Zhang-men-ren regarding raising goblins did not take place until the afternoon of April 17. The Zhang-men-ren’s reply of "no" was never validated because the indictment has already been published in the media. The forfeited peach wood sword never appeared in court as promised. The agent requested for return of the peach wood sword at the closure of the case, only to find the sword was nowhere to be found.
What's even more absurd, Hou Kuan-ren had no jurisdiction over the case after it was entirely transferred to another district on April 18, yet he still sent a memo to the Ministry of the Interior on April 25 and another memo to the county and city governments on May 21, "ordering" the dissolution of Tai Ji Men. On June 18, Hou again illegally sent another official document to the Taipei City and the Taipei County Government Works Bureau directly requesting that TJM be cut off from water and electricity. His intention appeared to exterminate Tai Ji Men entirely.
The Control Yuan initiated an investigation on the various measures that Hou Kuan-ren used to prosecute TJM and found multiple violations of the relevant provisions of the Criminal Procedure Law and serious violations of human rights. In 2002, the Control Yuan also found the content of the indictment inconsistent with the evidence collected, and then published a detailed list of Hou Kuan-ren’s 8 major violations, including disclosing case related information during an on-going investigation, illegal searches, illegal freezing of defendant’s assets before the verdict, exceeding his official authority and ordering the county and city governments for dissolving TJM, etc. Hou Kuan-ren also admitted that he never conducted any investigation before the prosecution which is a violation of the law of evidence.
In 2005, the Control Yuan elected the Tai Ji Men case as a major human rights protection case in the "Control Yuan’s 3rd Comprehensive Report on the Human Rights Protection Work." However, the persecution upon Tai Ji Men Zhang-men-ren and dizi still continues to date. As Professor Chen Zhi-long pointed out, the second and third waves of purges followed one after another. It was hoped that TJM was in the last mile of the journey before reaching justice, yet given the fact that TJM ‘s property will soon be forced to be auctioned off, it’s shocking to see the aftermath of martial law is still eroding Taiwan’s democracy.