After two consecutive days of marathon voting, Taiwan's legislative body passed the "Judges Act" on the third reading on the morning of the 22nd. In the future, the first-instance collegial panel of major criminal cases will be 6 people and 3 professional judges. The verdict will

After two consecutive days of marathon voting, Taiwan's legislative body passed the "Judges Act" on the third reading on the morning of the 22nd. In the future, the first-instance collegial panel of major criminal cases will be judged by 6 people and 3 professional judges, and the verdict will be guilty or death. All must be approved by more than 2/3 of the people.

Taiwan's legislative body began to vote item by item on the draft "People's Participation in Criminal Trial Law" at an extraordinary meeting on the 20th. The vote lasted until 12 o'clock in the middle of the night. The meeting continued early in the morning on the 21st and voted all night until the morning of the 22nd.

The lengthy discussion and voting process one by one made the representatives exhausted. When they stayed up late to vote, the people on stage expressed their opinions loudly, but everyone in the audience was asleep. Some people took out their tablets to play games and watch TV dramas to pass the time. During the vote, the blue and green caucus cadres will shout yes or no, reminding their respective representatives not to cast the wrong vote.

After 33 hours and 346 votes, all the draft provisions were reviewed at 8:40 am on the 22nd, and the third reading was completed at 9:40 am. The bill was finally renamed the "National Judges Law."

After the bill was reviewed and passed, the Kuomintang Democratic Progressive Party held up slogans and shouted, "The DPP opposes jury trials and is rejected by the whole people." The Democratic Progressive Party Democratic Representative held up a "Yes" sign with a smile.

The new law stipulates that those who are sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of more than 10 years in the future, or who intentionally commit crimes and cause death, should be tried by the public; the first-instance collegial panel will be composed of 6 people and 3 professional judges, and more than two-thirds are needed to decide whether the defendant is guilty. The number of people agrees, and there is at least one vote of professional judges; when imposing a sentence, a majority opinion must be included, and the death penalty must be approved by more than two-thirds.

When organizing a collegial panel, local courts notify county and city governments as needed to randomly select people who have lived in the jurisdiction of the court for more than 4 months. Anyone who is over 23 years old and has a high school vocational education or equivalent education is eligible to participate in the trial. Qualifications, but excludes party workers, active military police and legal professionals. During the period when people appear in court to participate in the trial, their units should give them public leave. If they fail to appear without justifiable reasons or make false statements or refuse to make statements, they may be fined not more than NT$60,000.

Since the initiative of private judicial reform groups to try out both the "jury system" and the "participation system" was rejected, many judicial reform groups held a sit-in protest outside the legislative body for 24 days to express their condemnation and dissatisfaction. Lin Yongsong, chairman of the

Civil Judicial Reform Association, said that the "participation system" means that civilian judges and professional judges jointly try and discuss cases. However, if the opinions are inconsistent, the civilian judges' decisions may be affected by professional judges due to the authoritarian effect. Lin Yongsong questioned that when reviewing such an important judicial reform bill, the DPP adopted a 24-hour power-free voting method. He doubted the quality of such legislation and believed that Tsai Ing-wen was eager to seek superficial achievements in judicial reform and did not really want to solve the problem. .

You Yinglong, chairman of the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation, who resigned from the Democratic Progressive Party last year, criticized on Facebook that this was a ridiculous and formal performance under the full power of the Democratic Progressive Party. Legislation was passed while the people were kept in the dark. Full social communication, discussion and understanding "show that the DPP, which has been in full power twice, has not learned to respect public opinion, does not take public opinion seriously, does whatever it wants, and throws democratic procedural justice out of the window."

Opposition parties such as the Kuomintang, the People's Party and the "Power of the Times" also condemned the DPP for forcing a vote to pass the bill. Kuomintang Chairman Jiang Wanan said that forcing the bill to pass would be a disaster, and many supporting measures must be proposed in the follow-up. The Kuomintang will work together with the judicial reform groups. Lai Xiangling, general convenor of the Popular Party Caucus, criticized the Democratic Progressive Party for trying to force a passage within the scheduled time and harming the quality of legislation. Qiu Xianzhi, the general convenor of the "Power of the Times" party group, also said that he was shocked and disappointed by the way the democratic representatives passed the vote while sleeping in the audience.