Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday voiced support for a plan to appeal against a Taipei High Administrative Court ruling that suspended two Central Taiwan Science Park expansion projects.
Wu again cast doubt on the professionalism of the Taipei High Administrative Court in the case, saying that cases such as these needed to be handled by judges who had a high level of knowledge in a related field of expertise.
“There has never been any case in the past in which administrative courts have ruled on a case related to [the thoroughness of] an environmental impact assessment [on a development project,]” Wu said. “If there is a medical [controversy] in the future, will the court also rule how deep the surgical cut should go [during an operation] and how many stitches should be made?”
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
Whether it was appropriate for administrative courts to judge an environmental impact assessment should be discussed, he said.
The court on Friday ordered the park to suspend all expansion activities in Cising (七星) in Houli Township (后里), Taichung County, as well as in Erlin (二林), Changhua County, because the environmental impact studies were incomplete.
Late last night, Wu said in a press statement that the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and the National Science Council had decided to appeal the case to the Supreme Administrative Court.
National Science Council Minister Lee Lou-chuang (李羅權) said the injunction handed down by the court was controversial and should be challenged.
He said the council would ask the EPA to conduct another environmental impact assessment within a month for the Houli expansion, as required by law.
If everything goes well, Lee said, the assessment would be completed by October and hopefully construction at Houli would resume.
The government would try its utmost to prevent businesses from suffering losses, Wu said yesterday.
“It is necessary to respect the court’s judgment, but the most important issue is to keep government policies consistent and coherent and to avoid investor losses,” he said.
Corporations decided to invest in the park because they had confidence in the government, therefore the government was obliged to protect their interests, he said.
“This is a case of concern for the nation’s economic development, investor confidence in Taiwan’s investment environment and environmental protection,” Wu said.
Wu said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians should sympathize with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government instead of making sarcastic remarks about the court ruling.
The opposition should remember that the two expansion projects, as well as the Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology plant, were all approved under the former DPP administration, he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
RSS