Imagine for a second what Taiwan would be like today if the Wild Lily Student Movement of the 1990s had not occurred or if student activists had stayed at home rather than protest the absurdity of the First National Congress, elected in China in 1947 under then Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration, serving in perpetuity in Taiwan.
Imagine what would happen if the democratic developments over the last two decades were undermined or the government attempted to turn back the clock. Most of us have a hard time envisioning this because such a scenario seems palpably absurd in a democracy.
Taiwan’s democracy would not be the same if these students had not voiced their discontent and protested against what they considered to be unreasonable two decades ago.
This is why National Kaohsiung Normal University’s recent decision to ban its students from taking part in rallies or parades and to require that faculty seek the school’s consent before making public statements was both ridiculous and alarming in equal measure.
The move is incomprehensible for various reasons, the most obvious being that it violates Article 14 of the Constitution, which grants people freedom to assemble.
The Council of Grand Justices’ Constitutional Interpretation No 445 defines this freedom as one of “the most important basic human rights in a democracy,” along with freedom of speech and the right to education.
The Constitution stipulates that the government cannot limit people’s freedom to assemble, unless it is believed that an event will infringe upon the freedoms of others, disturb social order or harm public well-being.
Although the University Act (大學法) entitles universities to write their own regulations governing student discipline, it does not give them the right to infringe their students’ basic human rights.
What compounds this absurdity is that the ban was proposed and passed by the university — one of the nation’s major “cradles” for junior and senior-high school teachers — partly because the school was following precedents set by two schools of similar nature and importance — National Taiwan Normal University and National Changhua University of Education.
It is unclear when these other schools wrote the ban into their student discipline regulations, but Taiwan Normal has revised its regulations on at least three occasions since January 2005, while Changhua has made four revisions since October 2002, but the article still remains.
Moreover, the University Act requires universities to submit a copy of their student discipline regulations to the Ministry of Education after each revision. The ministry has known about the article the whole time, but never felt the ban was problematic until recently.
This might be considered a minor oversight if it weren’t for the fact that the ministry set up a human rights education committee in April 2001, and sponsored a nationwide human rights awareness project. at schools between 2005 and 2008. It looks like some school officials must have skipped class.
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
On Sept. 3 in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled out a parade of new weapons in PLA service that threaten Taiwan — some of that Taiwan is addressing with added and new military investments and some of which it cannot, having to rely on the initiative of allies like the United States. The CCP’s goal of replacing US leadership on the global stage was advanced by the military parade, but also by China hosting in Tianjin an August 31-Sept. 1 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which since 2001 has specialized
RSS