A 37-year-old Vietnamese woman whose marriage to a Taiwanese man recently ended has filed for administrative litigation against the Ministry of the Interior’s decision to revoke her Republic of China (ROC) citizenship in March because she had engaged in an extramarital affair with a Vietnamese worker in Taiwan.
The woman decided to marry the Vietnamese man and visited a local household registration office in March to register their marriage. However, the ministry stripped her of her ROC citizenship by citing Article 19 of the Nationality Act (國籍法) and claiming that her affair showed she did not have “good morals” — a requirement to obtain citizenship. The ministry also suspected that her previous marriage had been a scheme to obtain citizenship.
Having given up her Vietnamese citizenship, the woman became stateless after living in Taiwan for eight years. In desperation, she began a legal battle against the government to retain her citizenship, insisting that her ex-husband did not sue her over the affair and that she has no criminal record.
She even made an argument against Minister of the Interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) over his previous extramarital affair with Non-Partisan Solidarity Union Legislator May Chin (高金素梅).
“The whole nation knows about Lee’s extramarital affair. If I don’t have good morals, neither does he,” she said.
Under the law, foreigners who obtain ROC citizenship can be stripped of their status if they engage in criminal activity or fail to demonstrate good morals over the following five years.
There are over 150,000 foreign spouses living in Taiwan, and more than 52,000 do not have ROC citizenship.
As the law requires foreigners to forsake their original citizenship to obtain ROC citizenship, people like Wu are left in civil limbo, and since they have to meet difficult requirements, such as having at least NT$5 million (US$170,000) in savings, the road back to naturalization is not easy.
The ministry’s move shows that foreign spouses continue to be targets of discrimination, and such disregard for human rights is ironic in a country that has signed two UN human rights covenants.
While President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration touts its efforts to improve human rights, the current law still treats foreign spouses and foreign workers as potential threats to social order, allowing the authorities to revoke their nationality based on a vague and abstract requirement of “good morals,” while putting up unnecessary hurdles for them to become an ROC citizen.
Immigrant-rights advocates have voiced opposition to the law and pushed for amendments to scrap regulations that require foreigners to behave “properly” in order to maintain their ROC citizenship. The proposed amendments also called for the cancelation of regulations that ask foreign spouses to meet minimum financial requirements when applying for naturalization.
The proposed amendments passed a preliminary review in the legislature in April, and Lee has given his support. However, the amendment to the law has yet to be completed.
As a country that often takes pride in the values of freedom and democracy, Taiwan clearly has a long way to go before discrimination is eliminated and human rights are respected.
It takes persistent efforts to improve human rights, and the authorities should take proactive measures to protect the rights of immigrants with more mature immigration policies and laws, so that society can become inclusive and truly embrace diversity.
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), former chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China and leader of the “blue fighters,” recently announced that he had canned his trip to east Africa, and he would stay in Taiwan for the recall vote on Saturday. He added that he hoped “his friends in the blue camp would follow his lead.” His statement is quite interesting for a few reasons. Jaw had been criticized following media reports that he would be traveling in east Africa during the recall vote. While he decided to stay in Taiwan after drawing a lot of flak, his hesitation says it all: If
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Saturday is the day of the first batch of recall votes primarily targeting lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The scale of the recall drive far outstrips the expectations from when the idea was mooted in January by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘). The mass recall effort is reminiscent of the Sunflower movement protests against the then-KMT government’s non-transparent attempts to push through a controversial cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014. That movement, initiated by students, civic groups and non-governmental organizations, included student-led protesters occupying the main legislative chamber for three weeks. The two movements are linked
RSS