When the fabricated Tai Ji Men case started, the fight to restore justice and answer the slander started as well.
Sara Susana Pozos Bravo*
*A paper presented at the webinar “13 July 2007: Who Stole Tai Ji Men’s Victory?” organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on July 13, 2024, on the 17th anniversary of Tai Ji Men’s Supreme Court victory.
How much does innocence cost? How much should be paid to repair the damage caused before the public opinion? How many times should the sentence of a court be published before the idea of guilt is reversed? How can the time lost as a consequence of false accusations and unnecessary persecution be recovered?
An irresponsible accusation based on fabricated evidence may destroy the good name of individuals and organizations. The consequences of such irresponsible accusations that usually start times of persecution through manipulated court cases are brutal for the individuals, for the families, and for the organizations being persecuted.
But how does the persecution begin and what do prosecutors pursue when they accuse innocent persons and fabricate evidence against them?
Not many years ago, the “others,” those who did not support the ruling governments, were routinely persecuted. Persecuting religious groups for not supporting the government in office was a customary practice in China for many centuries and even before the Civil War in the last century. It continued after the separation of Mainland China and Taiwan. In Taiwan, under the White Terror and the Martial Law, almost everyone was an enemy of the regime, including those religious movements. In that period of just over thirty years, it is estimated that more than 140,000 people were imprisoned or executed.
Taiwan’s democratization in the late 1980s and early 1990s did not dispose of the remnants of a form of government that refused to die. Thus, the last major crackdown on religious groups in Taiwan happened in 1996 and included Dr. Hong and Tai Ji Men, who were falsely accused by the prosecution of fraud, “raising goblins,” and tax evasion. The prosecution had begun, but so had the fight to clear the good name of Dr. Hong and the movement.
The prosecution of Tai Ji Men is one of those scandalous cases in which the prosecution viciously pursues a group by violating the law. It not only looks for the loophole or ambiguity in the law to do so; it also fabricates the case and the evidence and, by allying itself with the media, makes the innocent look guilty.
Today, when we review history, when we review the actions of the authorities, we are perplexed when we see how, systematically, the prosecutor and the National Taxation Bureau ignored the law and even the resolutions of the courts and insisted on holding the movement legally responsible.
But in the face of the prosecution’s persecution, Tai Ji Men’s lawyers kept winning legal battles and defeating their tormentors. In 2003, the trial judge found Tai Ji Men defendants not guilty (including of tax evasion). Months earlier, in March 2002, the Control Yuan identified eight major violations of law by the prosecutor in the case at hand.
In the administrative courts, most legal battles were also won by Tai Ji Men. In 2005, the Taichung High Administrative Court revoked the illegal tax bills issued by the National Taxation Bureau, a situation that also occurred in another Administrative Court, this time in Taipei.
The prelude to the triumph in criminal courts that we are celebrating today was the 2005 appeal judgment, whose ruling in favor of Tai Ji Men was resounding: not guilty of tax evasion; the famous red envelopes were donations and therefore not taxable; the uniforms were not sold for profit. This strong ruling was repeated in the third instance by the Supreme Court.
On a day like today, but 17 years ago, judging in third instance the Supreme Court upheld Tai Ji Men’s not guilty verdict. One year after this sentence, national compensation was awarded to all those who had been unjustly detained in the case.
The violence against “the others” gave rise to a struggle to defend the innocence of those who had been unjustly accused, persecuted, and slandered by the media. “The others” who, in the case at hand, had tried not to take a political stance, ended up being persecuted for this very reason.
Today, when we think that these violations of human rights, legal procedures, and all established norms are repeated in various parts of the world, in supposedly democratic countries and in others not so much, it is necessary to raise our voices to insist that the duty of the states is to respect human rights and procedural norms.
The story of the struggle that has robbed Tai Ji Men of more than two decades is in itself inspiring. To clear his image, Dr. Hong has done well to spare no effort and resources, and fighting decisions taken against all legal logic and legal principle—at least, that is how we see what happened from our side of the Planet—, he has fought to prove his innocence, even though it was the duty of the state to prove beyond doubt the accusations.
Seventeen years later, again from our side of the Planet, we applaud Tai Ji Men’s struggle, its triumph in the highest legal instances, and its work to make this world a better place in every way.
