The daughter of a Chinese medical researcher condemned to death on charges that he spied for Taiwan said yesterday that her father had not received a fair trial and should not be executed.
Ran Chen said her family was told on Nov. 18 that the Supreme People’s Court had approved the execution of Wo Weihan (伍維漢), who was convicted last year of spying.
Chen said family members were told to arrange to see him as soon as possible, usually a sign of pending execution.
She said she feared the execution could take place as early as today, when the family has arranged to see Wo at Beijing’s Intermediate People’s Court.
“We don’t know what will happen,” Chen said.
The court said yesterday it did not have any information on Wo’s case.
Chen, an Austrian citizen pursuing graduate studies in Berkley, California, said Wo was convicted mainly on the basis of a confession that he later recanted. She said the scant evidence brought by prosecutors never proved the spying charges.
A copy of Wo’s conviction said his alleged crimes included revealing the health status of an unnamed high-ranking Chinese official. China considers information about the health of leaders to be a state secret.
Wo was also convicted of passing on data about missile control systems, information Chen said had been published in a magazine and was only later classified as secret.
Wo was accused of passing the information through a middle man to a group linked to the Taiwanese intelligence agencies.
Amnesty International called on authorities to block the execution.
“Available information suggests that Wo Weihan did not receive a fair trial according to international standards,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific director.
Trained as a medical researcher, Wo ran a medical equipment supply company on the outskirts of Beijing and frequently traveled abroad. He was detained in January 2005, but not permitted to see a lawyer until a year later.
Wo has been held in a prison hospital since March 2005, shortly after suffering a brain hemorrhage.
He was sentenced to death by the Beijing court in May last year after a closed trial.
His appeal was denied on Feb. 29 this year and his sentence automatically forwarded to the Supreme Court for approval.
Although courts have been ordered to apply the death penalty for only the most egregious crimes, China remains the world’s leading executioner of prisoners, including many convicted for nonviolent crimes.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS