President Ma Ying-jeou on the morning of March 24 attended the opening ceremony of the 26th Australasian and Pacific Ombudsman Region Conference. During an address to the participants, the president stressed the importance of checks and balances to democracy and called upon civil servants at all levels of government to continue treating freedom, democracy, rule of law, and protection of human rights as the basis of governance.
The president noted that the Western ombudsman system was first established in Sweden in 1809, while Chinese nation has an analogous supervisory system that dates back over 2,000 years. The president added that after Dr. Sun Yat-sen established the ROC, Asia's first democratic republic, he advocated a five-power constitutional system comprising executive, legislative, and judicial branches as in the West, plus the two additional powers of supervision (control) and examination. President Ma remarked that prior to the promulgation of the ROC Constitution, the Control Yuan had already been established in 1931 under the Nationalist government. The Constitution came into force in 1947, after which the first members of the Control Yuan were selected. The Control Yuan then began officially operating in 1948 for the first time under the new Constitution. Since the Constitutional amendment of April 2000, Control Yuan members have been nominated by the nation's president and confirmed by the Legislative Yuan. In order to further internationalize the role of this body, he explained, the ROC joined the International Ombudsman Institute in 1994 and the Australasian and Pacific Ombudsman Region in 2002, creating an opportunity to continue building ties with other nations in this regard.
President Ma stated that the ROC's Control Yuan has four major missions – to protect human rights, promote good governance, enforce government ethics, and redress people's grievances. With regard to protecting human rights, the president noted that the ROC in 1967 signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, after the ROC lost its representation in the United Nations in 1971, it was unable to complete the ratification process for these two documents. The president said that in order to ensure that Taiwan's protection of human rights is in step with international standards, shortly after taking office in 2008 he announced that the nation should take action to ratify these two covenants as soon as possible. In 2009, the Legislative Yuan ratified the two covenants and passed an act to incorporate them into domestic law. On December 10, 2009, the date the two covenants went into effect, the government also began carrying out a thorough two-year review of related laws and regulations to determine whether any domestic laws or regulations run counter to the two covenants. The deadline for completion of the examination is December 10 (International Human Rights Day) this year. Meanwhile, the Office of the President has created a Human Rights Consultative Committee chaired by Vice President Vincent C. Siew to monitor the status of Taiwan's human rights. These efforts aim to bring Taiwan's human rights framework in line with that of advanced nations.
President Ma also stressed that government ethics are extremely important, noting that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." After taking office he called on government officials not to abuse their power, so that government power would stay within the limits of the law. He commented that the degree of democracy in Taiwan is rare within the ethnic Chinese community, and that the American think tank Freedom House rates the ROC as one of the free countries. And in addition, he called on the Control Yuan and all levels of government to continue treating freedom, democracy, rule of law, and protection of human rights as the basis of governance.