Newsletter
COUNSEL REQUIRED FOR PRI-VATE CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS AND APPEALS
In a 2005 judgment on a copyright infringement case, the Supreme Court noted that under Arti-cles 319 and 364 of the Code of Criminal Pro-cedure, the complainant in a private criminal prosecution or a private appellant must be rep-resented by a counsel. If he does not appoint counsel, under Article 273 Paragraph 6 of the Code the court must set a time limit for counsel to be appointed. In the case before the Court, the appellant had not retained counsel to represent him in his appeal to the Taiwan High Court; however, the high court had not set such a time limit, but directly continued with the proceedings and passed a judgment. The Court held that this procedure had been unlawful, and tainted the judgment, and it therefore set aside the high court’s judgment.
This is the first case, since the introduction of mandatory legal representation in private crimi-nal prosecutions and appeals, in which a sub-stantive judgment has been set aside on the pro-cedural grounds of a failure to appoint counsel.