Taiwan’s Uncounted Interpreters Go to the UN
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The rectification file · 29 October 2026
On 29 October 2026 I sent a four-page submission to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Margaret Satterthwaite, in answer to her public call for inputs on migrants’ access to independent and impartial justice systems. The inputs will inform her thematic report to the 65th session of the Human Rights Council, in mid-2027. Submissions are normally posted on the OHCHR website after the 27 November deadline; when mine appears, the link will be added here and at iLearn.tw/newsbrief.
The full text is here as a PDF (four pages). This post records what it says, what it does not say, and what it is worth.
What the submission says
Taiwan gave the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights the force of domestic law in 2009, and in 2020 made court interpretation mandatory for any criminal defendant who does not understand Mandarin. It publishes detailed annual statistics on its foreign defendants by nationality and outcome, and nothing on how often they are given an interpreter; its courts do not record whether one was present. The submission sets one documented case, mine, beside the National Human Rights Commission’s finding of March 2026 that the right is not reliably delivered, beside a freedom-of-information request for the appointment figure, filed on 3 September and unanswered when the submission went (later the same day the Judicial Yuan refused it, on the ground that a foreigner living abroad has no standing to ask; it did not say the figure does not exist), and beside a count of 105,762 criminal judgments from the courts’ open data in which every header records whether counsel appeared and none records an interpreter. It closes with five measures, three of which five scholars of law and interpreting put to the Judicial Yuan on 20 and 21 October: count and publish, record presence and language, and keep the hearing audio. The other two are a translated one-page notice of the post-conviction routes and their deadlines for every foreign defendant at final judgment, and a rule that an unrepresented, uninterpreted defendant is not taken to have waived the interpreter guarantee by failing to raise it in an appeal he wrote himself in a language he cannot read.
“A defendant cannot contest a finding he does not know has been made.”
Submission to the Special Rapporteur, paragraph 3.8
What it does not say
It does not ask the Rapporteur to take a view on my conviction, it names no judge or prosecutor, and it makes no allegation of misconduct. On the one point where my account and the court’s finding differ, how long the material was online, it says what I say, says what the court found, and records that I learned what the court had found only in September 2026, when I first read the judgments. That sentence is the submission’s reason for existing.
What it is worth, and what it is not
A thematic report is not a complaint procedure. The Rapporteur will not rule on a case, and she will not write to Taiwan, which is not a UN member state. What the submission does is put the record, and the scholars’ three requests, into the evidence base of a UN report, under my name, where anyone who searches for Taiwan’s court interpreters will find it, and where a lawyer in Taichung can cite it. That is the whole claim, and it is enough to have been worth four pages.
Who is named
The three signatories of the scholars’ letter who have consented to be named in it are Kent Roach, Professor of Law, University of Toronto; Dr Diana Eades, Adjunct Professor, University of New England, Australia; and Holly Mikkelson, Professor Emerita of Translation and Interpreting, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. The letter’s other signatories are not named, by their choice or mine.
The documents
- The submission (PDF, 4 pages) — sent 29 October 2026 to the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.
- OHCHR call for inputs — “Migrants’ Access to Independent and Impartial Justice Systems”, deadline 27 November 2026.
- The scholars’ letter to the Judicial Yuan — delivered 20 and 21 October 2026, 司法信箱 11510200006 and 11510210001.
- iLearn.tw/newsbrief — every document the submission cites, in Chinese and English.
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.
