The President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration yesterday unveiled a draft bill on establishing an oversight mechanism for bilateral agreements with China, as students opposing the cross-strait service trade pact have been demanding, but stressed that it would have no implication for the controversial service deal.
The student-led activists against the service sector liberalization are also demanding that the Executive Yuan withdraw the trade pact from the legislature and suspend its legislative review until the mechanism is up and running.
Four days after Ma expressed his support for the protesters’ demand that the supervision of cross-strait agreements be institutionalized at an international press conference on Mar. 29, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀) briefed members of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Central Standing Committee on the details of the draft legislation to set up the monitoring mechanism.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The draft legislation combines the four-stage communication guidelines that the ruling party proposed in February to bolster legislative supervision of cross-strait treaties with a two-stage national security screening mechanism established by the council in January.
The bill is due to be discussed at a Cabinet meeting today.
The communication guidelines would require the Executive Yuan to brief the legislative speaker and deputy speaker, all legislative caucuses, as well as any relevant legislative committees, on the proposed contents of a cross-strait agreement during the issue formation stage, the first of four phases.
In the second stage, the communication phase, the legislature would be routinely updated on the progress of negotiations, while in the third, pre-signing phase, the Executive Yuan would have to brief lawmakers on the important details of the accord, its potential benefits and the ways in which it is to be enacted.
Finally, the post-signing phase would see the Executive Yuan providing the legislature with special reports on the achievements of the cross-strait agreement upon request.
Meanwhile, the national security screening mechanism would require pending cross-strait pacts to be sent to the Cabinet for review first before being “assessed thoroughly” by a group of academics selected by the National Security Council to ensure that they would not negatively impact society, national defense and security through their views.
“The bill is part of the government’s effort to promote transparent cross-strait negotiations and to respond positively to the public’s call for the institutionalization of a mechanism to monitor future cross-strait pacts,” Executive Yuan spokesman Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said.
However, Sun added that the bill would “have no bearing” on the service trade pact with China, a stance in accordance with Ma’s repeated insistence that the agreement be exempt from the retroactive application of any future laws enacted to monitor cross-strait treaties.
There are two main differences between the Cabinet’s version of the bill and that drawn up by the Democratic Front Against Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement — the one favored by the student-led demonstrators who have been occupying the legislature since Mar. 18 to try and block the service trade pact.
The first difference is that the civic group’s version would entitle the legislature to revise and add new articles to the proposed contents of a cross-strait agreement during the pre-negotiation phase.
Second, during the pre-signing stage, civic groups would be allowed to conduct their own impact assessment reports on proposed bilateral agreements.
If their conclusions differ significantly from those reached by the Cabinet, the legislature would then have the right to demand the government renegotiate the pact.
A third discrepancy between the two versions was resolved when the government last night agreed to the stipulations in the group’s proposal that a cross-strait agreement can be revised after it is signed and that it will renegotiate terms with Beijing if the legislature fails to ratify a pact.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
RSS