The Taipei Times, Twice — and What Happened to Those Letters
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Rectification file · First published 31 October 2025 · Rewritten 11 October 2026
In 2025 the Taipei Times published two letters from me about my case: “Legal nightmare in Taiwan” on 7 May 2025 (page 8) and “Judicial complaint update” on 20 June 2025. Both have since been taken down. They came down at my own request for a correction, and this page explains why, keeps the archived copies, and records what the paper has written on the subject since.
What the letters said
The May letter described fifteen years in Taiwan, the dispute with my landlord, the conviction, and my departure in December 2024. The June letter was a follow-up. Both rested on one claim: that Taiwan's prosecutors had issued a letter “acknowledging that I acted without malicious intent and caused no harm”, so that the sentence stood for something the prosecution itself had declared non-criminal.
That claim was wrong. It came from an AI translation of one official letter, and I corrected it publicly on 3 November 2025 after the Control Yuan clarified the letter's wording in writing. The letter contained no such acknowledgment. No authority has found me innocent; I was convicted, and the conviction is final. The May letter also used the broad shorthand “denied access to an interpreter”; the precise record, which is the one I stand on now, is on my press page: no document in the proceedings was ever translated for me, some hearings were held with no interpreter at all, and at others the person sworn as interpreter conveyed, by my account, a fraction of what was said.
The archived letters. 7 May 2025, “Legal nightmare in Taiwan” · 20 June 2025, “Judicial complaint update” (Internet Archive captures). Read them with the correction above.
What happened to them
On 18 August 2026 I wrote to the paper's opinions editor asking that the two letters be corrected under my name, so that readers who had seen them would also see the correction. The paper removed both letters from its website the same day. I replied that removal was not what I had asked for, and that I would rather the correction stood in print; I have had no further reply. I am not complaining about the paper's decision: it acted on a correction request, promptly. But the corrected version of what I said belongs somewhere, and it is here.
What the paper has written since
On 4 April 2026 the Taipei Times published its own editorial, “Courtroom interpretation rights”, on the National Human Rights Commission's report that foreign defendants in Taiwan are not reliably given an interpreter or translated documents, and that nobody checks whether the interpretation they do get is accurate. The editorial asks that the right be “not only guaranteed on paper, but realized in practice”. It does not mention my case. It did not need to: my case is one documented instance of the gap it describes. On 2 October 2026 I submitted a reader's response to that editorial, with the documents; it has not been published.
Where the story went
Since the letters came down, the record has been published elsewhere, in the precise wording: a commentary in JURIST on 29 September 2026, an op-ed for Indonesian workers in Magdalene on 8 October 2026, and the complete Canadian consular file, released under the Privacy Act on 9 October 2026. I remain grateful that a Taiwanese newspaper gave a reader's letter space twice in 2025, and I would welcome the chance to put the corrected record before its readers.
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 Chinese originals govern; my translations are working translations.
