Regarding human rights abuses at NCKU

Subject:
Regarding human rights abuses at NCKU
From:
Richard
Date:
Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:25:45 +0800
To:
MOE
CC:
scholarsatrisk@nyu.edu

Minister TU Cheng-sheng,
Minister of Education
Ministry of Education
Taipei, Taiwan
ROC

cc: Scholars at Risk

10 October 2007

Dear Minister Tu,

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, the current president's 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 (the punitive damages would punish the university for willful misconduct and warn other universities against similar misconduct). The failure to punish officials at NCKU 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. That should be a priority, before advocating for representation in the United Nations on the basis of Taiwan democracy.
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.
Should American universities challenge degrees awarded to Taiwan students like NCKU challenged my Ministry award? Should we then claim those students have no right to appeal because they're Taiwanese? You know as well as I, there would be riots on the streets of Taiwan, protesting American injustice.
I find it insulting that even as Taiwan aggressively petitions the international community on the basis of democratic principles, those principles are scorned with impunity at our university, with the indifference or complicity of most faculty and the Ministry of Education's coddling of defiant officials: as if NCKU officials were co-regents of government instead of government servants bound by law like everybody else.
This case is now in its ninth year and pending. I have incurred great losses financially and to my academic career. Yet I have received no compensation for those losses and not even 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!
Meanwhile I have been denied compensation even in Taiwan's courts. In fact, no fewer than three judges ruled I was not entitled to compensatory damages for travel expenses incurred during the duration of my appeal, even though the university defied a legal Ministry ruling for two years, forcing those travel costs upon me! The Taiwan court punishes the victim of injustice instead of punishing the officials who caused the injustice in the first place!
As I understand the court decision, I was not entitled to compensation for periodic trips outside of Taiwan to renew my visa because I could have left Taiwan and lived in America during that period! In other words, even though I won a legal Ministry ruling in January 2001, the court expected me to give up my apartment, dispose of all my possessions, give up my mailing address and telephone line, all professional contacts, and return to America and wait there until the university decided it wished to comply with a legal ruling by the Ministry of Education; besides, risking a devious trick by university officials to hold a meeting with my presence required as soon as officials here realized I had returned home. I suppose the Taiwan courts would then have ruled that my returning home was "de facto" proof that I had given up my rights and had therefore forfeited my claim to employment at the university!
I don't think such a ruling would be acceptable in any democracy in the world. The facts speak for themselves. Not a single university official has been punished. The victim receives no compensation at all, other than what he was entitled to in the first place, even though it cost him nine years of his career! Moreover, he incurs all losses during the period of the university's defiance of a legal ruling (visa expenses, travel, hotel costs, etc.).
Not only is this an injustice to me. But it also discourages all faculty from advancing academic standards and human rights at our university, knowing such a commitment would be futile in the long run, since the university has nothing to lose by unfair retaliation.
Therefore I am committed to receiving both monetary compensation and a formal apology from National Cheng Kung University for documented abuses against me. An apology without monetary compensation is as empty as monetary compensation without an apology. The two must go together if this case is to achieve a formal closure guaranteed by human rights principles.
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 either the Ministry of Education or the university to compensate me 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 the Ministry of Education, especially on this historical holiday ("The Double Tenth") that the only proof of a democracy are principles of democracy.

Sincerely,

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