The US said on Friday it had flown five Chinese Muslim men who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison to resettle in Albania, declining to send them back to China because they might face persecution.
The State Department said Albania accepted the five ethnic Uighurs -- including two whose quest for freedom went all the way to the US Supreme Court -- for resettlement as refugees.
The Pentagon said 17 other Chinese Uighurs remained at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because, unlike the five sent to Albania, they were still deemed "enemy combatants."
Ethnic Uighurs come from Xinjiang. Many Muslim Uighurs seek greater autonomy for the region and some want independence from China. Beijing has waged a relentless campaign against what it calls the violent separatist activities of the Uighurs.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that Albania's resettlement of the men was an important humanitarian gesture, and expressed the US' appreciation for its cooperation.
The US Supreme Court declined last month to consider whether a judge could free two of the five men -- Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim -- even though the US government had determined that they were not enemy combatants. A federal judge had found their detention unlawful.
Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights representing the two men, said their case was due to be heard again in court on Monday. Olshansky said the US government's decision to send them to Albania was made "to avoid having to answer in court for keeping innocent men in jail."
"We had no idea they were going to Albania. We didn't have any time to get anything on the ground to assist them with resettlement or to find out about whether they are trying to send them into some kind of detention," Olshansky said.
The two men were captured in Pakistan and have been detained since June 2002 at Guantanamo.
The US still holds about 480 detainees at Guantanamo, the Pentagon said, and has freed or handed over to their home governments a total of 272 detainees.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
One of two tropical depressions that formed off Taiwan yesterday morning could turn into a moderate typhoon by the weekend, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Tropical Depression No. 21 formed at 8am about 1,850km off the southeast coast, CWA forecaster Lee Meng-hsuan (李孟軒) said. The weather system is expected to move northwest as it builds momentum, possibly intensifying this weekend into a typhoon, which would be called Mitag, Lee said. The radius of the storm is expected to reach almost 200km, she said. It is forecast to approach the southeast of Taiwan on Monday next week and pass through the Bashi Channel
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The number of Chinese spouses applying for dependent residency as well as long-term residency in Taiwan has decreased, the Mainland Affairs Council said yesterday, adding that the reduction of Chinese spouses staying or living in Taiwan is only one facet reflecting the general decrease in the number of people willing to get married in Taiwan. The number of Chinese spouses applying for dependent residency last year was 7,123, down by 2,931, or 29.15 percent, from the previous year. The same census showed that the number of Chinese spouses applying for long-term residency and receiving approval last year stood at 2,973, down 1,520,
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