Tai Ji Men was prosecuted by the then prosecutor Hou Kuanren of the Taipei District Prosecutor’s Office in 1996. The wrongful prosecution has violated freedom of religion, belief and culture, and the basic human rights of property and personal freedom for 25 years.
In 2002, the Control Yuan listed Hou Kuan-jen’s eight major violations of the Criminal Procedure Law, including the violation of the confidentiality principle that an ongoing prosecutorial investigation should not be disclosed to the public, illegal searches, illegal freezing of assets, acting beyond the prosecutor’s authority by ordering county and city governments to shut down Tai Ji Men’s facilities, violating the Code of Criminal Procedure and the defendants’ rights and interests, undermining a prosecutor’s image of fair and just law enforcement, etc. The Ministry of Justice was also requested to take strict disciplinary actions against Hou. The case was selected as a major human rights protection case in the third-term’s General Report on the Work of Human Rights Protection of the Control Yuan (1999-2005). However, the Ministry of Justice stated, “We will wait until the criminal verdict is confirmed,” and illegally transferred the case to the High Prosecutors Office to re-investigate whether there is any violation of the law. After Tai Ji Men was found not guilty and tax exempt in the third instance on July 13, 2007, the Ministry of Justice and the High Prosecutors Office argued they were unable to demand Hou Kuan-jen’s accountability. The time period they prosecuted Hou started from June, 1997 to June 18, 2007, has passed the statute of limitations for disciplinary actions. However, on October 30, 2007, December 17, 2007, and February 22 and March 6, 2008, the High Procurators Office continued to subpoena the master (shifu) and Tai Ji Men dizi Chen Tiao-hsin and others for investigation. However, the Ministry of Justice issued a letter on March 11, 2008 that the High Prosecutors Office was still investigating Hou Kuan-jen’s violations. If the disciplinary statute of limitations has expired on June 18, 2007, wouldn’t the follow-up investigation be self-contradictory? Obviously, “the expiration of the statute of limitations for prosecution” is an excuse for protecting law-bending officials from punishment. Moreover, there is no time limitations at all for Hou Kuan-jen’s punishment::
- In 2002, the Control Yuan transferred Hou Kuan-jen to the Ministry of Justice for punishment. It was to ask the Ministry of Justice to find out who was to blame, not to request a re-investigation. Therefore, the disciplinary power has been launched and the administrative investigation has entered the stage of administrative accountability. There is no issue with the statute of limitation.
- Since 1997, Hou Kuan-jen’s persecution on Tai Ji Men’s shifu and dizi has never ceased. The NTB still quotes Hou Kuan-jen’s illegal indictment materials 25 years ago that had been abandoned by criminal court to impose taxes, and even illegally transferred them to the Administrative Enforcement Agency for forced auction of Tai Ji Men’s lands, which were planned for their spiritual practice site. Now these lands have been forcibly nationalized. It is obvious that the persecution has not yet ended, and the 10-year statute of limitations should not be counted at all.
- According to Article 29 of the Rome Statute, the statute of limitations is not applicable to crimes of human rights abuses. For example, Shih Mu-chin, the former chairman of the Civil Service Disciplinary Committee, has been impeached for improper hospitality since he was the president of the court in 1997, the compensation for the 228 incidents that caused heavy deaths and injuries to the people due to the improper use of state power by the government in 1947, and the compensation for the Jiang Guo-qing case in 1996. They have all exceeded the 10-year disciplinary statute of limitations. Based on the principle of equality, there should be no difference in the applicable statute of limitations for Hou Kuan-jen’s punishment. Moreover, in the Nazi Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago, Germany still sentenced many senior persecutors. Therefore, as to serious human rights violations caused by illegal officials’ abusing public power, there is sufficient evidence of no statute of limitations for disciplinary actions in both Taiwan and foreign countries.
Tai Ji Men has won the state compensation in 2009, and the evidence of the victimization is clear. Hou Kuan-jen should be punished in accordance with the law. However, he has not received any punishment or been asked for any compensation by the government. Instead, he is promoted all the way to the deputy director-general of the Agency Against Corruption under the Ministry of Justice. The abuse of power and illegal actions of the prosecutors and the failure of the Ministry of Justice to punish in accordance with their authority have not only deeply damaged the judicial image but seriously violated the Constitution of the Republic of China, the two Covenants, the implementation law of the two Covenants, and the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, infringing on the country’s democracy and the rule of law and harming human rights. The Ministry of Justice should immediately remove Hou Kuan-jen from office and make investigation to demonstrate the effectiveness of constitutional supervision and separation of powers, protect human rights, safeguard human dignity, and then defend religious belief and cultural freedom, and return the innocence and justice to Tai Ji Men’s Shifu and dizi.