The Taipei City Government yesterday agreed to journalists’ demands that the city’s police department be granted only observer status on a committee investigating the controversial arrests of students and reporters at the Ministry of Education last week.
The city government is convinced that the reporters had been engaged in news gathering, city spokesman Sydney Lin (林鶴明) said, after a three-hour meeting of the city investigation committee chaired by Taipei Deputy Mayor Teng Chia-chi (鄧家基).
Questions remain about the roles of the police, public prosecutors and the Ministry of Education in the reporters and students’ arrests, Lin added.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
The police department has maintained that it had no choice but to arrest the reporters because they were caught “red-handed” at the site.
Police arrested three reporters late on Thursday evening last week along with student activists who had broken into the ministry building to protest controversial adjustments to the high-school social studies curriculum guidelines.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) had originally said that having Taipei Police Department Commissioner Chiu Feng-kuang’s (邱豐光) sit on the committee was not problematic because he was just “one” of its members.
The city’s decision drew a mixed response from the reporters and their supporters.
“Because the police commissioner is the target of an investigation, it would be inappropriate for him to serve as a committee member,” Media Workers Labor Rights Working Group representative Huang Yi-yuan (黃驛淵) said. “We demand that the city government or police department apologize for this violation of press freedom, or it would leave an extremely negative precedent.”
Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) photographer Liao Chen-hui (廖振輝) reiterated that the reporters were just doing their jobs when they entered the ministry building.
“There was a news event happening and the news scene was inside [the ministry building],” he said. “If we did not go in, there would have been no way that we could conduct interviews and gather news.”
The reporters were not there to challenge the authority of the ministry of the police, but purely to engage in news gathering, he said, adding that they were not “co-conspirators” of student activists
Wellington Koo (顧立雄), one of the lawyers representing the reporters, urged the city government to require police to provide all the evidence they had gathered on the case and allow reporters to respond individually to all points of contention.
He said that there were concerns about the committee’s impartiality because of Ko’s previous comments that he would not discipline police officers over the incident.
Ko launched the internal city investigation following controversy over the arrests, with the committee inviting students and reporters to present their versions of last week’s events.
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