Decisions against Tai Ji Men suggest that distortions of administrative justice studied by international scholars are at work in Taiwan too.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*Introduction to the webinar “The Judiciary, Freedom of Religion or Belief, and the Tai Ji Men Case,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on January 11, 2025, Taiwan’s Judicial Day.
This is the first Judicial Day in Taiwan after the unjust decision of the Taichung High Administrative Court that, on August 2, 2024, missed what looked like a golden opportunity for solving the Tai Ji Men case.
I am both a sociologist and an attorney but one thing I am not is an expert of Taiwanese law. My comments are conjectural. Although I may thus be wrong, it seems to me that what we see at work in Taiwan in the Tai Ji Men case is an instance of one of the oldest and most debated issues in the field of sociology of law, i.e., the conflict between administrative and criminal (and civil) law.
It seems to me that the best decisions in the Tai Ji Men case came from criminal courts, which exonerated Tai Ji Men from all crimes, including tax evasion. The landmark decision of Taiwan’s Supreme Court in favor of Tai Ji Men of July 13, 2007 came from the criminal division of that high court. As opposite to it, the worst decisions in the Tai Ji Men case were pronounced by administrative courts. They include the decision of August 19, 2006, of the Supreme Administrative Court on the 1992 tax bill and the recent decision of August 2, 2024, of the Taichung High Administrative Court.
I am not proposing this as a sort of law without exceptions. There were also good decisions by administrative courts in the Tai Ji Men case, including the Supreme Administrative Court decision of July 26, 2018, and the subsequent order of September 10, 2019 of the Taichung High Administrative Court, which led to the correction to zero of the tax bills for the years other than 1992. Also, in 2020, the Taipei High Administrative Court sent two letters to the National Taxation Bureau of the Central Area, with copy to the Hsinchu Branch of the Administrative Enforcement Agency, asking them to treat the tax bill for 1992 according to the same standards adopted for the tax bills for the other years, and withdraw the enforcement.
So, my comments are not a general indictment of Taiwan’s administrative courts. Yet, the 2006 and 2024 decisions are grossly unfair and show that problems exist with Taiwan’s administrative justice, although not always and not everywhere.
This is not a problem in Taiwan only. Among the many scholarly traditions he inaugurated as the father of modern sociology, Émile Durkheim is also credited with having invented the sociology of law.
He did it in his doctoral dissertation, “The Division of Labour in Society,” published as a book in 1893. Durkheim famously distinguished between older and simpler societies, which he called mechanical, and modern industrialized and capitalized societies, which he called organic. He argued that in mechanical societies criminal law prevailed, while in organic societies civil and administrative law became more important. He did not see this as a necessarily negative process. However, he warned that if administrative law was not enforced with honesty, common sense, and empathy for the rights of citizens a condition of disorder and generalized injustice may follow, which he called anomie.
That Durkheim was right was proved by the work of a scholar called in the United States the “father of administrative law,” Kenneth Culp Davis, whose major works were published in the 1950s. Davis noted what seemed an irresistible expansion of administrative law. In 1961, the number of decisions of administrative courts was eleven times higher than the one of the decisions of civil and criminal courts combined. Davis was certainly not against administrative justice—he had been himself one of the drafters of the U.S. Administrative Procedure Act of 1946—, yet he noted that administrative courts did run a risk of encroaching on other courts’ fields and develop a sense of unaccountability and judicial omnipotence.
Let me repeat that I am not familiar enough with the Taiwanese legal system to state with certainty that this is what is happening in Taiwan. However, these phenomena continue to be noted by scholars at an international scale.
One principle is clear: administrative courts should not be totally independent from other courts. They should take into account decisions of civil and criminal judges, particularly when they come from the highest courts in the country. In the Tai Ji Men case, this means that administrative courts cannot ignore the conclusions of other courts, including the Supreme Court in 2007, that Tai Ji Men is not a cram school, that the offerings its Shifu (Grand Master) receives are tax-exempt gifts rather than taxable tuition fees, and that Tai Ji Men never committed tax evasion. If these conclusions would have been accepted and diligently applied to administrative matters, the Tai Ji Men case would have been solved long ago. It is now late, but it is not too late. The solution of the Tai Ji Men case passes through a reconciliation of administrative justice with criminal and civil justice—and with common sense too.
In this Judicial Day, let’s express the hope that 2025 will be the year when this reconciliation will be achieved, and justice and fairness will prevail.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
