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Taipei City fines education ministry over banners

The Taipei City Government fined the Ministry of Education (MOE) NT$10,000 yesterday for replacing its banners on the renamed National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall, and reported Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝), the hall's administrative director and a contractor to prosecutors.

The city also fined the ministry -- for the third time -- in its latest move to counter the ministry's decision to hang the banners, which the city's Department of Cultural Affairs took down on Tuesday.

The city accused Tu, top hall official Tseng Kun-ti (曾坤地) and a contractor of violating the Labor Inspection Law (勞動檢查法) by setting up scaffolding -- without any safety protection -- to rehang the banners, thereby endangering construction workers.

"Taipei City's Labor Department already demanded a halt to construction due to safety concern over the scaffolding. We condemned the ministry for insisting on replacing the banners without considering workers' safety," Cultural Affairs Department chief Lee Yong-ping (李永萍) said at Taipei City Hall.

She urged the ministry to resubmit its construction application by Monday, but acknowledged that the department's advisory committee might not approve the application.

"If we allowed the ministry to hang the banners and canvas, it would not be fair to the `Red Army,' whose application to hang banners on Jinfumen during [last fall's] anti-corruption campaign was turned down," she said.

The ministry's Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Administration applied to the city government last month to allow what it termed second-phase maintenance of the hall. The scaffolding erected for that project was used last Saturday to put up canvas and banners that covered the hall's name plate.

City officials announced on Wednesday that the central government had not applied for construction permits since 2005, and it accused the ministry of deliberately misleading the city government.

Yeh Chin-yuan (葉慶元), commissioner of the city's Laws and Regulations Commission, denied Taipei has started a legal battle with the ministry, while saying that it would continue to act according to the law.

"The ministry keeps violating the laws, and the city government has no choice but to take action against their moves," he said.

In response to the ministry's remarks that it may sue Lee and the city for tearing down its banners, Yeh said the city government had the authority to act as it had.

She said the city would countersue the ministry for bringing a false charge if the ministry did file a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, the ministry said in a statement yesterday that the two banners had been displayed in accordance with the Cultural Heritage Preservation Law (化資產保存法) and it denied breaking any laws.

The Taipei City Government had broken the law by tearing down the first banner, the statement said.

The ministry's director of social affairs, Chu Nan-hsien (朱楠賢), whose department oversees the memorial, said yesterday it would sue the city government for confiscating the first banner on the grounds that it damaged public property and acted outside the law.

The city government's fines for allegedly breaking the Cultural Heritage Preservation Law, he said, were a "distortion of the law."

At issue is whether the ministry violated Article 30 in the law, which states that construction projects must not compromise the integrity of historical structures, nor cover a structure's exterior.

The banners did not damage the integrity of the hall since the public could still view the exterior, the ministry said, so it had not broken the law.

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