Regarding compensation and an apology for human rights abuses at NCKU

Subject:
Regarding compensation and an apology for human rights abuses at NCKU
From:
RDC
Date:
Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:43:51 +0800
To:
em50000@email.ncku.edu.tw, higher@mail.moe.gov.tw

Ming Chiao-Lai
Office of the President
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan

cc: Ministry of Education

11 October 2007

Dear President Lai,

As you know, faculty and administrators at National Cheng Kung University are responsible for grievous human rights abuses against an American professor teaching here.
Beginning in 1999, university officials solicited secret defamatory letters, secretly circulated those letters at official meetings, conspired to dismiss me, made unsupported accusations, and then used those accusations to effect my dismissal.
Although I won a legal Ministry of Education appeal ruling on 8 January 2001, your predecessor, Kao Chiang, defied that ruling for more than two years. Instead of enforcing that ruling, the administration tried to extort my resignation by threatening to contest the Ministry ruling for years in the courts.
Even after participating at several appeal hearings (including one at the Ministry of Education in Taipei), NCKU, with contemptuous duplicity, subsequently maintained, in court, that Americans had no right to appeal.
After my belated reinstatement, the university wrongfully revived accusations against me, denied me annual increments, and withheld those increments for several years, until this month.
The Ministry of Education repeatedly warned Kao Chiang and the current administration against these actions, but to no avail. In other words, university faculty and administrators have behaved in a willful, malicious, duplicitous, and defiant manner.
The fact that not a single university official has been punished is cause for concern, considering that Taiwan claims to be a democracy. Stubborn defiance of laws and human rights principles have no place in a true democracy.
In my country, NCKU would be liable for millions of US dollars in compensatory and punitive damages (punitive damages would punish the university for willful misconduct and warn other universities against similar misconduct). The failure to punish officials at NCKU undermines confidence in democracy here and compromises the future of Taiwan's democracy.
The actions of officials at our university have discredited our university, undermined the integrity of our committees, cost taxpayers needless expense, abused judicial process, and placed an unnecessary burden upon reputable faculty, including myself and those very few colleagues with a sense of right and wrong and the conscience to right the wrongs.
As you know, this case is now in its ninth year and still pending, primarily because of the university's stubborn arrogance. My country allows full human rights, dignity, and protection under the law to all citizens, with compensatory rights. American citizens should be treated the same in Taiwan.
Human rights abuses against me are especially outrageous in view of the fact that our university has academic exchanges with sister colleges in the US, where human rights principles are guaranteed equally under the law. Under the circumstances, I don't believe NCKU should be allowed to maintain those academic exchanges.
I have incurred great losses financially and to my academic career. Yet I have received no compensation for those losses, nor an apology. Instead, the university continues to contest all claims for compensation, even costs incurred during the two-year period following its defiance of a legal ruling by the Ministry of Education!
In view of these abuses, the university's stubborn refusal to remedy them, and the losses I've incurred fighting them, I hereby formally request compensation to the sum of five million New Taiwan dollars. In addition, I request a formal apology, without which this case will not achieve acceptable closure.
Otherwise I shall continue to seek legal remedy elsewhere until this case achieves closure (compensatory and punitive) acceptable by international human rights standards.
I wish to remind you that the university has not only violated my rights but has done so in a stubborn and defiant manner, completely unacceptable by international standards, regardless whether such misconduct is deemed acceptable at our university. In the end, it is the standards of the international community that will decide the outcome of this case and proper penalties against our university.

Sincerely,

Richard de Canio
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
Tainan, Taiwan