Delivered: Four Scholars Write to Taiwan’s Judicial Yuan on Court Interpretation

The rectification file  ·  20 October 2026

On 20 October 2026 a letter from four scholars of law, interpreting and forensic linguistics, from Canada, Australia and Korea, was delivered to Taiwan’s Judicial Yuan; a fifth, from the United States, added her name the same day. It takes no position on any individual case, including mine. It asks the Judicial Yuan for three things, each of which can be counted.

I convened the letter and I am not a signatory. The Chinese text is the operative one and went first; the English version follows it on the documents page. This post records what the letter asks, who signed, how it was delivered, and what I will do with the answer.

What the letter asks

Taiwan has done two things that few jurisdictions have done. In 2009 it gave the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including the right to the free assistance of an interpreter, the force of domestic law. In 2020 it amended Article 99 of its Code of Criminal Procedure so that a defendant who does not understand Mandarin “shall” be assisted by an interpreter. The letter begins by saying so, in appreciation. Then it points to the gap. On 31 March 2026 Taiwan’s National Human Rights Commission reported that the right is not reliably delivered in practice and that, where interpretation is provided, nothing checks its quality. And nobody can see from the record the courts publish whether the guarantee is working, because the record does not say: in 105,762 criminal judgments released in the Judicial Yuan’s open-data archive for four months between 2021 and 2025, not one records in its header whether an interpreter was present. A silent judgment is not proof that no interpreter attended; the point is that the record cannot tell you either way.

So the letter asks for three measures of documentation and verification, none of which needs new legislation:

1. Publish the number. In the annual Judicial Statistics, the number and proportion of criminal proceedings involving defendants who do not understand Mandarin in which an interpreter was appointed under Article 99, by year, court level and language. The Judicial Yuan already publishes detailed statistics on foreign defendants by nationality and outcome; this is the one figure that is missing.
2. Record it in the file. The presence or absence of an interpreter, and the language interpreted, in a fixed field of every hearing record and in the header of every criminal judgment, so that the figure can be compiled from the record rather than estimated.
3. Check the quality. A mechanism for verifying court interpretation, as the Commission recommended: at a minimum, hearing audio kept for the duration of any appeal, and a stated way for a party to raise a concern about accuracy during or after a hearing.

“We write in appreciation of what Taiwan has already legislated, and in the hope that it will now make the result visible.”

Letter to the Judicial Yuan, 20 October 2026

Who signed

Four scholars signed, in a personal capacity: of law, of interpreting, and of forensic linguistics, from Canada, Australia and Korea. Two have consented to be named here: Kent Roach, Professor of Law, University of Toronto, and Dr Diana Eades, Adjunct Professor, University of New England, Australia. The other two, scholars of interpreting in Korea and Australia, are not named on this page; a name appears here only with that signatory’s consent. All four names and institutions are on the letter as the Judicial Yuan, the National Human Rights Commission and the Legislative Yuan’s judiciary committee received it; affiliations were listed for identification only. The letter was circulated to every signatory in its final form, with the full list of names, before it was delivered.

A fifth scholar added her name after delivery on the same day: Holly Mikkelson, Professor Emerita of Translation and Interpreting, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, author of Introduction to Court Interpreting. The three recipients were notified that night (司法信箱 case 11510210001; email to the Commission; fax to the two conveners’ offices). She signed the text with its three requests unchanged and has consented to be named.

How it was delivered

Why this, and why now

The Taipei Times put the question in its editorial of 4 April 2026, on the Commission’s report: whether the right to an interpreter is “not only guaranteed on paper, but realized in practice”. Nobody can answer that today, because the one figure that would answer it is not published. On 3 September 2026 I asked the Judicial Yuan for that figure under Taiwan’s freedom-of-information law (司法信箱 11509030004); there has been no decision, and a reminder sent on 2 October (11510020001) is also unanswered. The scholars’ letter asks for the same figure as a permanent line in the statistics rather than a one-off release.

My own case is one instance of what that figure would measure, and the letter does not mention it. In my proceedings no document was ever translated for me; some hearings were held with no interpreter at all, including an evening hearing in February 2023 that went ahead after the judge asked me, in Chinese, whether I understood Chinese; at others the person sworn as interpreter conveyed, by my account, a fraction of what was said; legal-aid counsel at first instance did not interpret, and I had no counsel on appeal. That record is published, in exactly that wording, by JURIST and on the documents page. I am not asking anyone to retry the facts.

What happens next

There is no fixed deadline for a reply to the Judicial Yuan’s mailbox. Its answer, when it comes, will be published here and on the documents page in full, and if it declines, that will be published too. If the Judicial Yuan releases the figure, in reply to the letter or to the information request, I will publish it with its source. Any signatory who consents to be named will be named.

The documents

• iLearn.tw/newsbrief, section 3 — the letter in Chinese and English, and the delivery record.
• Taipei Times editorial, 4 April 2026 — “Courtroom interpretation rights”, on the National Human Rights Commission’s report of 31 March 2026.
• JURIST, 29 September 2026 — the record of one case, with every document linked.
• Supreme Court of Taiwan, 114年度台上字第2354號 (9 July 2025) and 114年度台上字第1495號 (30 July 2025) — the two decisions the letter cites on the right to rely on an interpreter and on testing an interpreter’s accuracy against the courtroom recording.

What you can do

If you are a journalist in Taiwan, the question to put to the Judicial Yuan is short: how many times in 2025 was an interpreter appointed under Article 99, and where is that number published? If you are an interpreter or a scholar who would have signed, the text is on the documents page and the Judicial Yuan’s mailbox is open to anyone. If you are a foreign defendant in Taiwan, or know one: ask for an interpreter under Article 99, by name, before the hearing begins.

Two things I say everywhere: my correspondence and these posts are prepared with AI assistance from my own documents, and I check every fact personally; and in 2025 I publicly relied on a mistranslation of one official letter and corrected the record after written clarification. The letter itself was reviewed and signed by its signatories; its Chinese text is the operative text.