Department of Government Ethics

The 8th annual Intercollegiate Debate Tournament, co-hosted by Taipei City Government and Agency Against Corruption, Ministry of Justice (AAC), took place from October 17th to 19th, 2014, at the Cheng Zhong Campus, Soochow University. This year, the tournament attracted 20 debate teams representing their schools, both foreign and domestic, including University of Macau, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Universiti Sains Malaysia. Approximately 120 college students with outstanding debate skills dwelled on the debate subject “Should the government pass the Information Disclosure Act?“ In other words, “Should the government pass regulations protecting the whistleblowers for acts of justice?” Throughout the tournament, the students engaged in 29 rounds of debate and competed for the title of championship.
Department of Government Ethics of Taipei City Government (DOGE) said, that having hosted the Intercollegiate Debate Tournament for 8 consecutive years, DOGE hopes to introduce the anti-corruption motif to the college campuses. This year’s debate prompt “Should the government pass Information Disclosure Act?” was chosen in attempt to arouse college students’ awareness of public issues through their research and team discussions. This year’s tournament continued to follow last year’s tradition, inviting debate teams from foreign colleges to exchange information with local teams in order to provoke new thoughts for corruption prevention. In the opening speech of the tournament, Yang, Shi-Jin, the vice director-general of the AAC, pointed out that it has been very difficult to be aware of and to gather evidence about the corruptive behaviors within the internal government. Therefore, he addressed, that it is essential that the whistleblowers, under the protection of laws, have strong courage to reveal illegal acts so that more scandals can be exposed. As the Information Disclosure Act will have been completed by the end of 2014, DOGE expects the students to understand how the law is progressed and written. In the future, the AAC will spend most of its advocating power on graduating college students, expecting them, before entering the job market, to know the deleterious effects of corruption and priceless values of integrity. So that corruption is not to be tolerated whatsoever.
DOGE also announced, that this year’s tournament invited the scholars of National Chengchi University and Transparency International Chinese Taipei to be the judges of the final debate. These scholars were excited to share with the students the motives behind the Information Disclosure Act and the international legislative trends.