Taiwan’s China-friendly former president, Ma Ying-jeou, was found not guilty of leaking classified information about a senior opposition legislator, ending a yearlong legal process that had threatened to undermine faith in the office.
Taipei District Court spokesman Liao Chien-yu said the court found the charges against Ma either lacked evidence or that his actions were legal.
Prosecutors had charged Ma in March after a six-month probe with breaking laws on the protection of personal information, release of secrets and communications security and surveillance. The charges carried a maximum sentence of three years each.
Ma issued a statement over the weekend commenting on the verdict, saying he hoped it would set a precedent allowing presidents to serve their terms without having to worry about facing legal action after leaving office.
“I hope future past presidents need not face all kinds of pointless entanglements and can peacefully govern the country constitutionally,” Ma said.
Ex-President Chen Shui-bian, who served from 2000 to 2008, was convicted after leaving office on charges related to graft and bribery and sent to prison. His predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, was also investigated over corruption after leaving office.
A conviction would have caused some Taiwanese to lose faith in the presidency, said Liu Yih-jiun, public affairs professor at Fo Guang University in Taiwan. Ma had billed himself a clean leader and insisted on his innocence in the case.
“It would further damage people’s confidence on the level of the president,” Liu said. “It will leave people here a general bad impression.”
The 67-year-old U.S.-educated legal scholar was credited with improving relations with China, Taiwan’s chief political and military rival, during his two terms from 2008 to 2016.
But that improvement sparked mass protests among young Taiwanese wary of China’s intentions toward the island. Beijing sees self-ruled Taiwan as its own territory to be brought under control by force if necessary. That public backlash cost Ma’s Nationalist Party the presidency in January 2016 and ended its parliamentary majority that year.
Relations with China have suffered a sharp downturn under Ma’s successor, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, who has refused to endorse Beijing’s view that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory.
The charges against Ma arose from a 2013 lawsuit brought by Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker Ker Chien-ming. Ker accused the ex-president of leaking information from a wiretapped conversation in which Nationalist lawmaker Wang Jin-pyng pressed judicial officials to acquit Ker in a separate case.
Wang at the time was speaker of the legislature and Ma’s main political rival within the party. Ralph Jennings, Taipei, AP
Satellite for Taiwan launched from California
An Earth-observation satellite for Taiwan’s National Space Organization was launched into orbit from California last week.
The Formosat-5 satellite lifted off from coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base at 11:51 a.m. atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which successfully landed its first stage on a drone ship floating in the Pacific Ocean as the second stage continued on and deployed the satellite.
Moments before the first-stage touchdown the video link to the vessel froze, then reappeared and showed the rocket standing. Cheers erupted in the SpaceX control room in the Los Angeles suburb Hawthorne.
“This is the 15th successful landing of a Falcon 9,” said Lauren Lyons, the SpaceX webcast launch commentator.
Formosat-5 is the first satellite to be fully designed by Taiwan’s space agency and is intended to advance the nation’s space technology and scientific research while providing global imagery with a wide array of uses ranging from natural resource studies to disaster management.
Planned to operate for five years in low-Earth orbit, about 446 miles (720 kilometers) high, its main instrument is a sensor that can produce high-resolution black-and-white and color images.
A predecessor satellite, Formosat-2, produced more than 2.5 million images over 12 years of operation before it wore out and was decommissioned a year ago.
Formosat-5 also carries a secondary payload, an ionospheric probe for scientific research.
The landing of the Falcon 9 first stage aboard the drone ship Just Read the Instructions was the latest in a string of successful recoveries at sea or on shore by SpaceX, which sees reusability of major rocket components as key to driving down launch costs.
This past March, SpaceX reused a Falcon 9 first stage for the first time in a satellite launch from Florida and again successfully landed it. That first stage originally flew on a space station supply mission in April 2016.
