The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday that it could move to invalidate last month’s special municipality elections because of the sluggish investigation into Sean Lien’s (連勝文) election-eve shooting.
The announcement came just hours after the party released the findings of a poll suggesting that the public is not satisfied with the investigation so far.
“It’s been a month now. [Investigators] have already found a suspect, found the gun, but still nothing has been revealed,” DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said after a meeting of the party’s Central Standing Committee. “It’s time that the DPP pursued this more vigorously.”
Lien, a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Central Committee member and son of former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), survived after being shot at a campaign event for a KMT candidate on Nov. 26. DPP lawmakers claimed that the shooting led to a surge of sympathy votes for KMT candidates.
This is the first time the DPP has raised the possibility of filing a lawsuit to invalidate the election results.
FINAL DECISION
DPP officials did not say in which of the five cities the party could file the election lawsuits, but stressed that the matter is being handled by the party’s legal team. A final decision on whether to file the lawsuit is likely tomorrow, the last day before the statute of limitations run out, Tsai said.
She said the DPP was not “aiming to start a confrontation,” but hinted the challenge was made to spur investigators to more quickly reveal their findings. The public deserved to know the facts, she said, adding that a lawsuit was in the public interest.
“We are not hoping that someone wins or someone loses, we just want to know the truth,” she said. “This was an incident that hurt Taiwan’s democracy and something we definitely do not want to see happen again.”
According to a DPP poll earlier this week, more than 56 percent of respondents, including a majority of KMT supporters, expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of the investigation, which has dragged on for more than a month.
About seven out of 10 respondents also said that they did not believe that the incident was a “simple case of accidental shooting,” as maintained by police soon after it took place.
UNREASONABLE
Almost 64 percent of those polled thought it was “unreasonable” that no senior officials have resigned over the incident, the survey revealed.
“The poll suggests that ... the [government] should immediately reveal the truth of the issue in order to give society an understanding,” DPP spokesperson Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said.
A number of opposition lawmakers are expected to propose the establishment of a “truth commission” in the legislature tomorrow, modeled after the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee in 2004.
The move, which has to receive approval from the KMT-controlled procedural committee before it can be submitted, is unlikely to be supported by KMT lawmakers. DPP officials say the commission is necessary to resolve discrepancies that have been emerged since the incident.
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
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘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