Either independent Legislator Yen Ching-piao (顏清標) is having a remarkably bad run of luck with his health or he is playing the judiciary for fools.
Yen, sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison in June for illegal possession of firearms, fell ill and checked into hospital complaining of chest pains on July 23 — the morning he was scheduled to report to jail to begin his sentence.
Prosecutors granted him a three-week extension, but instead of reporting to jail on Wednesday, Yen checked back into hospital, this time for surgery, asking for a further five-week delay to the beginning of his sentence.
This time, prosecutors rejected his request, but did nothing to prevent the operation from going ahead even though Yen’s lawyers informed them a full four days beforehand that Yen had scheduled the surgery for Wednesday. Of course his human rights and health should be taken into consideration, but Yen’s succession of ailments do seem to have come at an extremely convenient time.
In this respect, Yen’s case bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英), the former unofficial treasurer of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), who last month fell ill the day before he was scheduled to start a 22-month prison sentence.
On that occasion, however, prosecutors were unconvinced and forced Liu to undergo tests before transferring him directly from his hospital bed to prison to begin his sentence — just two days after an apparent “heart attack.”
Lo and behold, Liu was photographed entering court just a few days later looking surprisingly fit and healthy, a stark contrast to the pasty-faced figure that was loaded into an ambulance a few days earlier.
Yet for some reason, prosecutors seem reluctant to take similar action in the case of Yen. Does their lack of will to put Yen behind bars have anything to do with his murky gangland background and the fact that he remains an extremely powerful figure in central Taiwan?
There is speculation that Yen is trying to avoid jail in a bid to deal with an upsurge in gang-related violence on his home turf and power base in Taichung County.
But it is also possible that Yen is seeking to prolong the beginning of his sentence until the next legislative session starts, as the Constitution states that no member of the legislature may be arrested or detained without the permission of the legislature while it is in session.
The pan-blue dominated legislature has already done an excellent job of stalling an investigation into whether KMT Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安) holds US citizenship, the result of which could see her lose her job, so the KMT would hardly be setting a precedent if it were to help Yen put his prison term on the backburner.
Either way, no one, not even a poor excuse for a lawmaker such as Yen, should be allowed to flout the law in this manner. If politicians continue to demonstrate such little respect for the rule of law and the judiciary, it will be hardly surprising when the public follows suit.
“We cannot continue to grant [Yen’s] requests again and again or it will not be fair to others,” a Taichung prosecutor said.
It’s time for the nation’s law enforcement agencies to put their money where their mouths are.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Last week, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) unveiled the location of Nvidia’s new Taipei headquarters and announced plans to build the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer in Taiwan. In Taipei, Huang’s announcement was welcomed as a milestone for Taiwan’s tech industry. However, beneath the excitement lies a significant question: Can Taiwan’s electricity infrastructure, especially its renewable energy supply, keep up with growing demand from AI chipmaking? Despite its leadership in digital hardware, Taiwan lags behind in renewable energy adoption. Moreover, the electricity grid is already experiencing supply shortages. As Taiwan’s role in AI manufacturing expands, it is critical that
RSS