The Philippines’ decision to send 14 Taiwanese fraud suspects to China for trial was made in observance of Manila’s “one China” policy, Philippine Presidential Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr said yesterday.
Ochoa’s remarks in an interview on DZMM Radio in the Philippines were the first official comment from the Presidential Office in Manila since a dispute broke out on Feb. 2 between Taiwan and the Philippines over Manila’s deportation of 14 Taiwanese to China that same day.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded last night to Ochoa’s remarks with a statement that said Taiwan’s understanding of the Philippines’ “one China policy” was that it was a policy, not a law, and that any country should have its foreign policy based in accordance with its laws.
In line with the Philippines’ immigration law, the Taiwanese should have been deported to Taiwan, not China, the ministry said.
Earlier yesterday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said the government was seeking talks with several Southeast Asian countries about the possibility of a joint effort to combat cross-border crime.
In an interview with the Central News Agency, Yang said incidents of Chinese and Taiwanese working together to defraud people in China and Taiwan have occurred not only in the Philippines, but in other Southeast Asian countries as well.
Apart from telephone and Internet fraud, cross-border drug trafficking and arms smuggling are also a problem, he said.
“We need to build a mechanism for cooperation to combat international crime,” he said.
The foreign ministry and the Ministry of Justice will draft a proposal on talking with Southeast Asian countries on combating cross-border crime, Yang said.
Yang also said he would summon Antonio Basilio, head of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei, as soon as Representative to Manila Donald Lee (李傳通) returned from to Taipei yesterday.
The foreign ministry has called in Basilio and his deputies three times over the past week to lodge protests over what it said was the Philippines’ disregard for Taiwan’s jurisdiction over the Taiwanese deported to China.
Meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) accused Lee of neglecting his duty.
Tsai said the Taiwanese were arrested by Philippine authorities in late December and Lee had 38 days to negotiate with Manila before they were deported to China. However, according to information he received from Taiwanese businesspeople in the Philippines, Lee played golf many times during that period, Tsai said.
“It was a lie when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Lee claimed that they had done their best to deal with Manila over this matter,” Tsai said.
Some of the parents of the Taiwanese suspects told a press conference yesterday that they hoped their offspring could be tried by Taiwanese courts, not Chinese.
Accompanied by DPP lawmakers, the mother of one deportees said her son should be punished if he has “done something wrong, but I hope he can be tried here in Taiwan, so that I can at least see him.”
The father of another suspect apologized for his son “upsetting the government and society.” He said he hoped his son would be returned to Taiwan for trial because he did not know how trials were conducted in China.
Another parent said he did not know where his son was because the foreign ministry had not yet contacted him or his family, and he had only learned about the deportation from TV reports.
Additional reporting by Rich Chang
This story has been updated since it was first printed.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
PREPAREDNESS: Given the difficulty of importing ammunition during wartime, the Ministry of National Defense said it would prioritize ‘coproduction’ partnerships A newly formed unit of the Marine Corps tasked with land-based security operations has recently replaced its aging, domestically produced rifles with more advanced, US-made M4A1 rifles, a source said yesterday. The unnamed source familiar with the matter said the First Security Battalion of the Marine Corps’ Air Defense and Base Guard Group has replaced its older T65K2 rifles, which have been in service since the late 1980s, with the newly received M4A1s. The source did not say exactly when the upgrade took place or how many M4A1s were issued to the battalion. The confirmation came after Chinese-language media reported
RSS