Green Party: Zoe Lee, Taiwan’s Weed Lawyer

Taiwan 2020: Women Running for Legislature

The News Lens
Date: 2020/01/07
By: Brian Hioe

New Bloom interviewed Zoe Lee (李菁琪), party list legislative candidate for the Green Party. Lee is a human rights and environmental lawyer, best known for handling cannabis-related cases and her podcast about weed regulations and issues.

Brian Hioe: Could you introduce yourself to readers who may not know you?

L: I’m Zoe Lee, I’m a lawyer. My Facebook page is called Better Call Zoe. I also do a podcast, which is about weed. I started a fan page on Facebook in Ma3rch about pot-related issues.

I was originally at an NGO called the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association. It’s quite an interesting NGO because it only handles pro bono environmental cases, and people usually don’t have the money for these cases. Like the Asia Cement mine in Hualien. The indigenous there were scammed out of their land 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no way they would have enough money to sue this large conglomerate. These are the kinds of issues that Wild at Heart works on.

This was my first job as a lawyer. My first case was suing Ma Ying-jeou for failing to do his official duty overseeing the construction of the Taipei Dome. He was the Taipei mayor then. That’s how I got started as an environmental lawyer.

About being a human rights lawyer? At the end of 2017, the Tsai administration made changes to the Labor Standards Act. Everyone was protesting in Taipei then. I brought some food from a wedding banquet to the protest for everyone because the lawyers there were taking shifts.
[FULL  STORY]